Prague (61 page)

-OH, MY IMRE, thank you. thank you. Can you hear me? Can you let me know you hear me? You have such beautiful eyes, you are so good to show them to me! Thank you. Can you squeeze my hand? Can you? Oh, very good! Don't make yourself tired, of course. You are so good, you are so good. I want to get the doctor now. Oh, you don't know where you are, you poor man. you are so good. I will be back in only a moment. Don't be frightened. I am here, I have never left your side. You don't understand me, do you? Oh, you look so lost, please just believe me. you will understand, you will be yourself soon, Horvath ur."

AND IF THEY COME for him, then this is how he wishes to be taken, from her arms, from this narrow little bed, which can scarcely bear the weight of the two of them. Let them all climb out of their tanks to sit and gawk and applaud as she and John ignore them. Her hands are everywhere, her mouth is everywhere, their clothes, emptied, collapsed in a useless pile—let the Russians have them. Though they never left their beloved little apartment, they have made their successful escape, he and his wife with the beautiful pianist's hands and the hoarse voice and the soft day-old stubble on the top of her shaven head and the acquired taste of that tremendous jaw. His beautiful, brave wife: She would not choose to be anywhere else but here making love with him; she would choose a city under attack with him over any safe paradise that lacked

him. And the list they have spent so many hours making, let it go. let the Russians burn it or eal it or give it to shrugging, stymied cryptologists. There is no frontier to cross that they cannot cross right here and now as their bodies merge—his and his wife's—as they close so tightly that there is no longer a clear distinction where one begins and the other ends; a fusion has occurred, as it. does every lime they are together; parts are exchanged, and no one finishes quite the same as they began. So let them have her piano, her easels and canvases and darkroom, all her secret papers from the embassy—the hell with all that.

"CAN YOU BLINK? You can? Did he, Doctor? That was a blink for us, wasn't it? Oh, Imrc—Horvath ur, excuse me if 1 call you Imre. You have been asleep for a very long—"

"Fraulein. perhaps we should allow him to adjust slowly. We do not wish to shock—"

"Yes, fine, but let go of me.IIorvath lir, if you can hear me, just blink twice quickly. Can you do that for—hey! Yes! You are so brave! You Swiss, did you see? You saw? You would not believe me, but you saw! He hears, and he can say yes. Two blinks is yes from now, okay, Imre? And one is no. Until you talk we will do this . . . Oh, there is so much to tell you, yes. Let go of me, Swiss! Okay. I will leave with you, but, Horvath lir, I will be back. You rest now, Imre. and I will tell you everything when you are feeling more energy. Please, Swiss, let me be."

"AMAZING, i BOUGHT the damn thing in Tokyo a week ago and now it's stone-dead. Won't make a bloody mark. Paid five hundred dollars to have the damn thing in monogrammcd gold." "Please take mine."

A KNOCKING ON THE DOOR, quiet at first, then quickly louder. "Amerikati Hey! Amerikai! Mit csmdlnak's Nyissdk ki az ajtdt!" The sound of troops—John held on for one more moment—the sound of troops who knew he was here. Let them splinter the deadbolt and beat down the door and storm in, poor imbeciles, stunted cruel children: let them shoot me dead just as 1 am right now, I will fall forward, exhausted, onto her body and into her arms one last time.

THE SENSATION WAS a new one. something vibrating through rubbery muscles. He was amazed to feel his thoughts moving far more quickly than the cor-

responding events. A peculiar and wonderful feeling, like coming to himself after an incredibly long and deep sleep. The sight of the pens moving across the documents was remarkable: They moved so slowly that Charles could see the ink pouring out in black rivers around the tiny balls in the pen tips; he could hear the scratch of those balls carving canals in the paper, could hear the rustle of the ink rushing into those canals and then crackling as it froze. In the space of a single signature, he had time enough to think of poor old Mark Pay-ton, not (amazingly!) a total fool after all: There are moments that matter a great deal, moments that draw onto and into themselves all three time zones— past, present, future—and forge of them strange hybrids: future-past, present-future, past-present. As his own pen carved and poured and froze the beautiful lines and swinging curves of his signature, he knew the feelings he would have about this moment forty years in the future, the growing love he would have for this precise instant. He heard the beauty not only in the sound of his pen scraping along the paper right now but the growing beauty of that same sound with each passing year, as if a noise could grow louder with each echo, ringing out perhaps most loudly at an anniversary (March 12, 1992; March 12, 1999; March 12, 2031), but loud as well on dates wholly unrelated to this one, triggered by little things; a broken golden pen. a man with a substantial subnasal mole, a metallic cologne like poor Kyle's, a tie like Neville's (an odd taste the Brits all seern to have—where did he find such a pattern?). But most of all there was this present—the sight of that signature and the tremendous testimony of it: He had sold for much more than he had boughl. He had definitively proven his alchemy. What was financial genius but an ability to see the future more quickly than anyone else? This signature—right now spilling out from around that tiny metal ball—proved that he could grasp the very soul of assets, could assess their essential worth before anyone else, could then mix with those assets his own magical, potent seed. Payton had been right, and for a moment it was true: He sincerely did envy the researcher his impassioned scholarship ( . .. one of the game's most beautiful aspects. . .). His heart beat in his cars, and he suddenly feared he might blush or giggle or otherwise give himself away to these other men.

"YOUR COLLEAGUE is very loyal to you and was with you for every of these days for a very long time now." Imre did not have the muscle control to smile or to cry, but the news, in this cold doctor's poor Hungarian, that his partner had not left his side (throughout whatever this experience had been) penetrated the

clouds of his cyclical semi-wakefulness, and he hoped Krisztina or the doctor would bring his colleague in as soon as possible. He understood he was in a hospital, and that he was very tired and that his eyes moved but nothing else and that his throat was terribly dry. But that Karoly had not left his side, had been here every day for a very long time now during this ... Imre's eyes closed again, and the doctor wiped the pool of moisture away from the corner of his patient's mouth.

"HEY, AMERIKAH New York! California! Hey. hey! Tor! Porte!"

"Oh for Christ's sake, get a fucking c/uc!" Nicky climbed off. stomped nude down the narrow rectangle, and unbolted the rattling door. Faced with this naked baldness, with this self-explanatory, disgusted fury, the red tracksuit retreated, launching a defensive, lame sort of lascivious leer at the nude vision, then turned away, threatening something unintelligibly Hungarian. When Nicky returned, ready to pick up where she had left off, she found her partner in tears. "What is f/7/s?" she asked, still angry at the interruption, and now horrified at this gross violation of house rules. But she wasn't cruel; she could make herself semi-lean against the chalky white and yellow wall, and hold the sobbing boy's head on her lap and stroke his damp, curly hair and mutter the embarrassing little nonsensibilities that people seemed to like muttered in these cases, even as she scolded herself for all the work she could have gotten done this afternoon.

MARCH.
  
A
  
SERIES
  
OF
  
NEWSPAPER
  
ARTICLES
  
AND
  
TELEVISION
  
STORIES,
  
A

dozen concentric circles radiating from an epicenter in Budapest (John's desk, to be seismic-ally specific) and trembling all the way across oceans: / promise

this is my last column on this deal, but its twists and turns are worth keeping an eye on as your legs dangle off your comfy chair in the Forum lobby and you irritably ask your indifferent waitress why she can't make proper coffee. Because now, with Median, the new Democratic-Capitalist Hungary™ has earned the noisy, vulgar trust of a real, live multinational, and there can be no better endorsement for an orphaned. ex-Red nation hoping to join the family of nations than the cold-eyed blessing of men whose money matters to them. ..

... I/ you recall our story a few months ago about our own hometown boy. that young Cle.velander far away in Eastern Europe whose spunk and determination. . .

AT LAST, WINDOWS could be opened a few inches at the height of day. Krisztina opened one now. "We should celebrate with some fresh air," she said softly, for with fumbling and spillage in equal measure. Imrc had used a straw: A small trickle of orange juice had bubbled between his lips and. sated, he blinked only once when asked if he wanted more. Did he want some air? Did he need another pillow? Would he like to listen to some Gypsy music? She still could not quite bring herself to talk press business to his blinks. She decided he needn't worry himself with it yet. though she knew she simply could not bear to be the one to tell him or. perhaps worse, to be the last to learn that he had known all along and had simply never bothered to tell her, had approved it all long before he was ill. Still, she could hardly look at him. sick and di/xy as she was from the syrup of guilt and fury that boiled in her. Unable to scream or sob, instead she tried to force herself lo enjoy her role as a full-time nurse of sorts, a tedious cheerful voice with an artificial smile and exhausted eyes who allowed herself to go home once a day for a shower-bath and a change of clothes, and. she noticed lately with overwhelming sadness, that she wasn't even enjoying the usual pleasures of early spring weather. She had noticed recently that Budapest was in what her mother used to call "the impatient time," when children demanded winter's end. and they hated the dark spaces between buildings that protected the last of the last season's snow, stubborn and horrible little leftovers precisely the shape of their patron-shadows.

NEVILLE HOWARD'S LAW FIRM occupied the second story of an Italianate villa high up Andrassy ut. the first tloor of which was still a faint and fading pink remnant of other times, red limes when the villa had been on the Avenue of the People's Republic, of even brighter red times when it had sat at the top of Stalin Avenue. To the firm's chuckling irritation, the villa's first floor was still occupied by the Society lo Promote Soviet-Hungarian Friendship, which had recently watched its ideals and purpose vanish in one befuddling event after another, until the Soviet ambassador himself was looking for other work, never to give his old Friends another thought. The members of the society clung to the inside of their villa like confused ivy, and swallowed their bile and their doubls. heard the supercilious greetings of their new neighbors— specialists in stock market deals—and today looked through the windows that remained to them, at the ornate wooden benches on Andrassy lit. There, under the newly warm sun and over the quickly surrendering snow, young client (a

newly minted financial genius) and young counsel (his star rising fast in the firm) consulted post-lunch, both leaning back and stretching out their legs, both allowing the sun to warm them through their closed eyelids and open topcoats. "He's slightly better," said young client. "He seemed glad to see me, as much as you can tell with him. Pity. I explained the deal, the value of his shares, the arrangements for his care. I think he was relieved I had taken care of everything, to the extent he followed me. Ohhh, mixed feelings probably inevitable, of course. So look. You'll be in charge of executing all those odds and ends for him, since my plans are pretty well set." "Of course, naturally," said counsel.

SPRING DOESN'T IMPLY WARMTH in this part of Canada, but the plump, red-haired young man, slightly dulled by pills, was satisfied to wait for his ride outside in the eye-stinging chill. He had grown to like the outdoors these past months; after Budapest, the rural surroundings here had an inoffensive time-lessness to them (except for one view, through the game-room picture window at dawn, uncomfortably reminiscent of the Thomas Cole painting The Last of the Mohicans). He sat on his luggage, said nothing to the mild psychologist who waited with him. When his parents' station wagon arrived to collect him, he accepted another of the doctor's business cards and was reminded of the helpful mnemonic for daily peace, and he shook his well-wisher's hand. He absorbed gentle hugs from his parents, now in their second decade of finding him saddening and obscure, and he sank into the backseat with the elderly chocolate Lab he had named for one of Charles I's dogs years earlier. He watched the collegiate hospital recede through the car window, noticed that he did not yet achingly miss his time there, and he would have been hard-pressed to say that the pills were not basically an improvement, more or less.

ON THE LAST EVENING of March, it would be another week before you'd be tempted to take your evening drink on the patio and another two before you could indulge that temptation without quickly regretting it and retreating, fumbling with cups and saucers, back inside. But on this last evening of March, sitting warm inside the Gerbeaud, near the window's reminiscent views but far from the door's drafts, with the sound of clinking dishes and the scent and rattle of coffee beans pouring in or out of brass bins, relaxing under the lighted mirrors and mirrored lights, well-accustomed to the by now endearing sight of grouchy waitresses in fringed vinyl boots, taking as long as necessary on your