Prague (40 page)

Imre clasped Charles's hand long after it was natural, and peered into his eyes. "I don't want only a bank," he said. "I want the future."

PRAGUE I 22S

"I very much understand. That's why I'm doing this."

The agreement was simple. Charles, having applied for and been quickly granted a leave of absence from his firm to raise money for the Horvath Press's expansion, repatriation, and renovation, would have August to accomplish his first step. With the full support of his firm (which, Charles explained, was hamstrung by geographic limitations in its charter but was eager to see Charles succeed), he would contact and secure commitments of financing from a group of Western investors. The terms of those agreements were entirely his affair. The minority investors would individually contract with Charles, so that the money he brought to Horvath would represent, in essence, one person (Charles) freeing Horvath from having to negotiate with a group. Charles would then represent this consortium and, on its behalf, acquire 49 percent of a new company, incorporating Charles's new money, the Horvath Verlag in Vienna, and the symbolically insufficient (or insufficiently symbolic) credit vouchers paid by the Hungarian government as compensation for the 1949 confiscation of the original Kiado. Imre would retain 51 percent of the new company, whose first transaction would be to bid on the rump Kiado held by the Hungarian state, essentially paying the ransom money necessary to release Imre's past into his control. (The reality was simpler still. Charles, having never mentioned Imre to his firm since they brilliantly rejected the best deal they were going to see this year, had not applied for a leave of absence and would do nothing so loopy— throw away an office, a salary, business cards—until he had secured himself a viable deal with Imre.)

An embarrassed silence invaded the suite. The crumbly and coagulating remnants of a continental breakfast littered a black lacquered tray by the open French window, attracting the traffic noises of Szentharomsag Square as well as spastic, motelike mites. On the reflective, swooping cross-section oak of Imre's bedside table, the latest Mike Steele imbroglio—Lather, Rinse, Murder, Repeat—lay open and facedown, forming a little protective tent over a pair of horn-rim reading glasses. The open closet door boasted a dozen fine suits, shivering and swaying from time to time in the breeze. Charles silently gathered his notes and business-plan drafts. As the men wordlessly shook hands again at Imre's door, dry-cleaning came to collect his Hilton-emblazoned laundry bag and Ms. Toldy emerged from her room across the hall to prepare Mr. Horvath for his other appointments that day. She nodded frostily to Charles, enjoyed shutting the door on him and the laundry maid simultaneously.

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A FEW HOURS LATER, John Price sat in his corner of the BudapesToday office almost alone. Karen Whitley was taking four days off to entertain her visiting parents, and two other employees had just quit, one to return home, the other to accept a vaulting, gravity-scorning promotion to be the number two in an international newsmagazine's newly hatched Budapest bureau.

Pondering the two overwhelming personalities in his life, John watched his cursor, tried to separate Imre's seriousness from Emily's. | | j

| | | | Throughout Budapest, all around us, walk the survivors of moral examination. Tall walk the brave, hunched walk the craven, but we are visibly different from them, as surely as if we wore decorative scars across our cheeks and discs in our lips. We of the West have been spared certain tests, and there are those who thank God for the | | | |

My God, she went home with Bryon.

| | | \apparentlypermanentcommutationofthatdreadfultrial.Butsomeofus, perhaps, ache for it. We know we might not succeed, as many of those who lurk the streets of Budapest with downcast eyes did not succeed. We know there is no pleasure to be found in the yoke of tyrants. But nevertheless, there are those of us from the faraway West, the lucky West, who think of such trials with a certain envy. At least you would know who you were. You would know what you were made of. You would know the limits of your potential. And if you succeeded? If you did not break? Can we say for certain there is no pleasure to be found in that yoke? \ \ \

To live a work of art. Emily would understand what that means. What Imre is. What Scott will never understand. I am not ready for her, and she knows it. I'm not serious enough. Not something enough. She is waiting for me to be something enough. She is trying to teach me how to live like her. She is waiting for me to see something clearly and to show her that I see it. She could not kiss me from a position of inequality.

| | | | And though one sees in many of the Hungarians a natural envy for our wealth, our ease, our pardon from History, still there is, even in the eyes of the defeated, a certain pride that is justifiable. Even those who were beaten, who compromised, who collaborated, who lost their way, who thought they did right when they did wrong, or who knew they did wrong but felt they had no choice, or who took advantage of the times and now regret it or merely suffer reprisals in choking anger— even in the eyes of all of these, I see something very much like condescension: We have not been tested, and they know it. No one has asked us to collaborate in order to save a friend, to distinguish between dark gray and dark gray. Even those who failed stand

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somewhat tatter when they look upon those of us who were not even tried. They do not only envy us. They also laugh at us. And I cannot say they are wrong. \ \

Is she with Bryon even now, taking the day off to laze and love under sticky sheets and open windows, slowly, nakedly fetching cold drinks? There's that bald girl.

And, in context, John realized he had in fact seen Nicky a few times in the office, had seen her walk into the newsroom just like this, pinning portfolios to her side, slim and aggressively chic in blazer, T-shirt, beret, sunglasses, jeans.

"Help yourself," she said, and dropped onto his desk a giant scuffed-leather portfolio tied at the corners with thick black string frayed at the ends. "I gotta convince our man from Down Under to take some of these," she said, tapping a second portfolio before knocking once on Editor's door and entering.

You find this, you return this, you hear? she had written alongside her phone number on a mailing label inside the portfolio's cover. He copied the number.

The top photograph in the collection was large, the size of a newspaper front page, black-and-white, a smoothly assembled photo collage: In a large auditorium, an audience of several hundred Soviet government officials—fat and frowning, in identical suits—sit attentively watching a man at a podium that bears an ornate hammer and sickle on its front panel. The speaker is a high Russian military officer, a marshal in a uniform spattered with medals and ribbons at the chest and flowery epaulet blossoms. On the podium rests his hat, one of those oversize Russian military caps like tilted, visored dinner plates. With an expression of great and serious intensity, the officer gestures with a pointer at the enormous screen hanging behind him. Projected there for the hundreds of apparatchiks is an anthropomorphic mouse cartoon character, wearing saddle shoes and a button-down dress shirt. The mouse's short pants, however, are bunched around his ankles, because he is furiously masturbating. Cartoon beads of sweat leap from his forehead and large black ears. His eyes are squeezed shut in violent ecstasy, and while one of his little four-fingered paws vise-clutches his cartoon member, the other holds aloft a photograph of Kon-stantin Chernenko, one of the late and later secretary-generals of the Soviet Union.

The second picture in her portfolio, smaller, also black-and-white: A young couple sits on a mound of rubble, the dusty bricks and broken furniture from some exploded building. They nuzzle side by side, facing front but turned

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toward each other for a kiss. His legs dangle in corduroys under a simple white shirt, his feet in untied work boots and a bandanna around his neck. She wears a long dress and black shoes, her ankles crossing. They look very much in love. Their eyes are closed. Just to their left, two soldiers of indistinct nationality fight. The soldier on the right has just plunged his bayonet into the belly of his enemy. His expression is ferocious and convincing, sweat and grime whipped with fear and hatred. The victim is fumbling at the blade burrowing into his stomach. His eyes are open wide in pleading.

"So that's my real life." She had returned unheard.

"I like it. I really like these."

"Do you? Do you really?" She seemed absolutely, sincerely pleased to receive this encouragement, which had gurgled out of his lips as thoughtfully as drool. "That's so great to hear. God, it really is." John couldn't think of anything intelligent to say about her work, but her happiness was contagious and he enjoyed the effect of his praise. She opened the other, her newspaper portfolio, now five pictures lighter, and laid it on his desk. She stood behind him, leaning over his chair, one hand on his shoulder, and she slowly turned the pictures over for him. His hand floated up and onto hers, and he watched the photos pass.

More conventional journalistic shots: leaders orating on this or that fungible topic; storefronts of glitzy new shops; Soviet tanks trundling out of Hungary four decades after arriving, with the top halves of Russians smiling and waving good-bye from open hatches; the members of a popular Hungarian techno-rock band, sweating and screaming under strobes. Artistic soft-news or human-interest photos: a stylized nighttime shot of the animated neon billboards that lit up one of Budapest's boulevards with steaming cups of neon coffee and slowly winking smokers, brands with mere months to live; the dirty faces of Gypsy children stranded in squalor, their tired eyes seemingly aware that they were both the descendants and the forebears of infinite generations of impoverished children who posed, or were still to pose, for infinite generations of compassionate, powerless photojournalists; ironic juxtapositions of Western businessmen and Hungarian peasant women caught in the same frame, standing in line to enter McDonald's.

John tossed more compliments over his shoulder, just to savor her happiness at catching them, a happiness that was so appealing, he started to wonder if it weren't a trick she performed on demand. "If you really like them, I do have

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more in my studio," she said. "How tall did we decide you were? Five-ten? Five-ten and a half?"

CHARLES SPENTTHE AFTERNOON typing and redrafting his notes into investor briefings and Horvath Holdings business plans. He kept his door closed and told Zsuzsa not to disturb him. Toward five, he wandered past the expectedly sleepy Presiding Vice's office and allowed himself to be invited in for inane conversation.

"Five-day weekend for me, Charlie, starting in eighteen minutes. I'll be out of pocket until Tuesday. Vienna. Viennese chickies. The only perk of working in this back water."

"That and your salary."

"And the press attention," conceded his chief.

The playful sun jumped from cloud to cloud, momentarily illuminating the brass fixtures and glass dome of the man's prized antique, a 1928 ticker tape machine. "Oh, I just remembered I wanted to ask you something," Charles mentioned as he was turning to leave. The vaguer the words now, the more broadly and durably his ass would be covered later if everything went awry: "That publishing deal, do you remember? The Austrian guy? Since we don't want it, I thought I'd suggest some other finance possibilities, maybe introduce him to a few people I know. I sort of like the guy and want to give him a hand, you know. Any objections?"

"Whatever," said his boss, rising sixteen minutes earlier than projected to gather at random a few work papers and folders destined to make a five-day trip to and from Vienna unexamined. "You want to join me in V-town, Big Chuck? We'll bring nylons for the frauleins."

IN THE LONG, unbroken rectangular room, half a dozen unfinished canvases on easels gestated under tarps while others leaned their foreheads shyly against the walls—punished, contrite, expected to contemplate their errors of composition or color. She turned one or two around for his inspection and bathed in his puzzled praise. She opened another portfolio of photographs. She showed him a darkroom behind curtains, and a clothesline of drying recent developments. She said little except to provide titles. "Biblical Extrapolation Series," she said in front of three small painted panels laid side by side on an old, splintering, paint-flecked table. She walked parallel to him, across from him, and she