Prague (48 page)

As Mark's absence persisted into the second week of September, John decided the Canadian was probably on a research trip. He should have said

something prior to departure, but Mark could do as he pleased. John had stopped by enough times, left enough messages. In the meantime, he had better things to do.

That afternoon, he stopped by Mark's building to see if his friend had returned. With Scott a lost cause once and for all, with Emily still too daunting to approach, with Charles shuttling between Budapest and Vienna, with Nicky oddly unavailable and more than usually off-putting, and with a long two hours before Nadja started playing, he had nothing better to do. In truth, he hungered for company. He was flinging the early autumn rain from his twirling umbrella, knocking on the unresponsive door, rattling the resentful knob, peering against the rebelliously reflective windows, when a large, bearded Hungarian emerged from a neighboring apartment. A long stream of foreign words—John caught az amerikai—accompanied this ursine arrival. John pointed at Mark's apartment and corrected the beard floating just above his eye level: "Kanadai." More foreign chatter ensued. Finally the man rubbed his right thumb and fingers together and banged twice on Mark's door: Rent seemed overdue. 'Ahhh," John said. "Okay, okay." With more sign language he convinced the man—a landlord or superintendent, evidently—to unlock Mark's door and the two of them walked inside, each with the other's permis-

sion.

The super stopped in front of the enormous photograph leaned against the wall, John's copulating torso at its center. Nibbling his beard and staring at the work with a worried concentration, he slowly nodded. John wandered from room to room, opening cupboards, drawers. Mark's clothes were gone, his luggage was gone, his toiletries were gone. Some laundry had been forgotten, now stiff and stinking in the washer, and his jumbo gramophone stood in the corner. His books and his notes remained, all removed from the shelves and neatly stacked on the kitchen table, under an envelope with Nicky's name on it. A panicked rip, but John found in it no suicide note (and quickly resented being tricked into the momentary panic), only a blurry Polaroid: one half of Mark standing to one side of Nicky's grand work, pointing toward it with the same air of proud ownership as the Elizabethan courtier. Nicky's work was inverted in the photograph (professor on the right, courtier on the left), and the visible half of Mark's face was covered with a Polaroid camera: The photo had been taken, badly, by Mark himself, using a mirror.

Whatever this scene was, it seemed at first to John a bit unreal or just the latest off-kilter display of the peculiar scholar—not so much something he did

do as something he would do. Mark hadn't killed himself or been kidnapped: He'd just gone away, pointedly saying good-bye to no one, and now John was childishly angry at the affront, then quickly sorry for himself. He phoned Charles: "Did Mark tell you that he was leaving?" He felt relieved not to be the only one. "In that case, I have someone here for you to talk to if you're still looking for an apartment. And tell him to let me stay alone until you get here." He handed the phone to the landlord (unwilling to pull his eyes from Nicky's vast and stimulating work).

Left to himself, John knew he was supposed to take some action, understand something about all of this. He boiled water for the Czech strawberry tea the stingy kitchen had yielded. He listened to and then erased three weeks of his own lonely voice on the otherwise unoccupied answering machine, the pleading tone of his messages both fascinating and repellent. He sat at Mark's small table, underneath the Sarah Bernhardt poster and the hollow map borders. He read Mark's notebooks from beginning to end, ready to understand, expecting explanations with each turn of a page, open to any messages Mark or Fate cared to send him, even as he began to tell himself that, yes, Mark had left without saying good-bye, but it didn't matter, wasn't serious, couldn't have any bearing on anything real...

The dated journal entries began in March, six weeks before John's arrival in Budapest, and they comprised, for a couple of months, dense, efficient, formalized records of research: numbers, quotes, references, cross-references, chapter outlines, half-finished essays, descriptions of antique stores spiked with parenthetical library call numbers. Essays on particular episodes of Budapest's history and the effect of these episodes on the city's landscape made John sleepy; he refilled his tea and opened the window. He began to doubt he would find any messages, lost track of what he was expecting to find, imagined himself—sometime in an indeterminate future, in a better place—discovering that some friend had disappeared and intently scouring the friend's abandoned notebooks looking for an explanation.

. . . with neither insight nor interest, the matter dropped by Parliament, and lingering questions of responsibility to the past ignored by population eager to (selectively) forget. . . cross-ref: Pruth on collective nostalgia during transformative eras...

... percent of pop knowledgeable about and angry at treaty of seventy years earlier remarkable—compare to pivot dates in West. Cross-check betrayal-centric national myths to measurable depth of affection for pre-betrayal habits, etc....

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... How long until the country, or certain sectors (elderly, e.g.), begin to long for some intangible element of recently discarded Communist past (stability, security, etc.)? Worth measuring the penetration and durability of this "nostalgie de la misere" and comparing it to the penetration and durability of ironic faux-nostalgia for Communism (i.e., photos in A Hdzam, V. I. Lenin's Pizza Shack, college-age participation in campy October Revolution parades, etc.)...

... Ponder this: a teenager in 1953 Hungary rebels against the fools who teach him and the foolish peers who sheepily go along with the Party line. It turns out, thirty-six years later, that that rebellious teenager was moral, a hero of conscience. Question: Had he grown up in Canada, would he have rebelled anyhow just because he was a teenager? Survey thought: Is there a higher degree of nostalgia for adolescence among people who, retrospectively, turn out to have been adolescents under a system subsequently acknowledged to be immoral?

These initial semischolarly efforts soon wandered away from grovey aca-demia. Even as early as late May, essays about Mark's reactions to his research dominated, displacing the research itself. The writing grew introspective, almost adolescent: descriptions of loneliness and desire John found embarrassing, long lists of questions about the meaning of life and work, tirades against family members and acquaintances, odd essays: Is memory a substance, a fluid secreted from within coiled knots of slick brain jelly, tricked out by smells? Do bumps on the head dislodge this mnemonic ooze? Or is memory an electrical force tickled out by quacky or wise practitioners of alternative medicine who touch mappable mnemo-nodes, and unleash a sudden flow? Or is memory a library, dusty and stuffed beyond all logic, a chaos beyond the skill of any taxonomist to save, book and book are dumped, a thousand thick volumes a day fill the library lobby and climb the stairs, overflow the elevator shafts, clog the toilets and sinks, crush metal shelves like paper, fall from the shattered windows in a schluffy heap onto the sidewalks and a few ancient, torn copies, deposited long ago, are suddenly available again, and old men stop and stoop and marvel to flip through crumbling pages that nearly melt under their touch and their tears as they read of their childhood pets and their mothers' private recipes, of neighbors inexplicably menacing and the smell of father's face after he shaved. . .

Man's third primal urge. Unlike Thanatos, which drives man to look forward to the end, and Eros, which drives men to look directly down, Retros drives us to look backward.

Mark had done no work at all for several months, perhaps nothing of any significance since the first few weeks after his arrival. The scholar would at-

tempt, in the midst of these outpourings, to focus, and for a day or two would produce the same sort of serious entries he had made at the beginning, but they would not last.

There is an old Canadian school of thought that runs: If you don't talk about it, it will go away, and this is a valid point. Nobody likes trouble. Look in their eyes when 1 relax—they tense up. Now why is that? Because I am inverted. I am the hanging man. I walk backward and I must stop being proud of it. It is wrong to walk backward in front of other people. Things could be significantly worse. The pain of others worse off than oneself. War dead, of course. They killed a lot of Canadians at Dieppe, lots of little boys with pasts, lots of favorite hand soaps, lots of nights spent with the wireless set, lots of other memories. Every time I ask them to see like me, they smile. And they are right; I must stop. Viruses demand quarantines. I am ready, I tell you, it's all done now, it's tamped and tamped and tamped I am stamping and tamping and stamping, I'm ready, I'll be good, please I'm done being away from everyone I'm so ready, please, please, please, I'll be good.

The journals did not end here, on this unpalatable cocktail of the pathetic and the deranged. Instead—and this bothered John more than all the rest, more than the tedium of the research, the grating angst, or the increasingly credible yet still somewhat unbelievable notion that Mark was literally "ill" or "in danger"—instead, the last of the notebooks ended with Mark realizing how he sounded and then flinching. John saw Mark grow disgusted and drape himself in ironic amusement:

Wait! This is becoming the testament of someone "unwell." How boring. I've gone all unwell. I see I need to remove myself from unhelpful stimuli, go where things are safely bland. You agree? Fair enough. And this is unfortunate, my failure, as it necessarily obscures the point; sickness is boring. The most interesting thing about Einstein was not his lactose intolerance. Just because I'm not tip-top doesn't mean I'm wrong. I could be perfectly healthy and still be right about everything else. There are billions of people who are healthy and who agree with me. I know there are; I can prove it; read my dissertation; I did prove it. Of course, I just can't bear to talk to them, any more than you can bear to talk to me. And why should you? Of course, one must remember this: Unrequited love is not fatal, it's just a temporary digestive disorder that leaves no visible marks, only a newly acquired but permanent inability to ever eat certain specific, unnecessary things again without having terrible digestive distress. Shrimp gives me gas, so I don't eat shrimp. I don't sit up nights crying about shrimp, right? All right then. Have two aspirin and a full glass of water, remember?

Now I really need to shut up. I have grown "!" and a little "yikes" and somewhat "ah, I see..." That's fat Canadian fags for you.

Thus ended Mark Payton's efforts to expand his doctoral dissertation into a popular history of nostalgia. And John remembered with sorrow that he had never introduced Mark to Nadja, though Mark had asked several times.

He didn't know where to put his eyes, embarrassed, even ashamed, by everything he looked at: the two strips of disparate geography with soft white torn edges, the poster of Sarah Bernhardt, yellowed where it met the wall and spotted with something orange-brown that had spattered from a frying pan, the stack of spiral notebooks and thick texts: Shreds of Glory, Remnants of Pride: How Empires Die and Are Remembered. Was Sade a Sadist? Was Christ a Christian?: An Exploration of the Nomenclature Issues Surrounding Charismatic Leaders. Budapest 1900. Are You My Sergeant?: Mnemo-Temporal Dysfunction in Combat Veterans. A fly materialized on the cover of the top text, A Century's Ends: Cultural Transformations in the '90's, 1290-1899 by Lisa R. Pruth, M.Phil. It strolled a few inches and rested, then promenaded again. It stopped for the second time in the recessed black title stamped on the red cloth. It rubbed its hands together and examined John through its hundred golden eyes. John crushed it into the black C of Cultural and sat for several minutes examining its new shape in the gray, rain-spotted light pushing through the window. Fractured hairline legs and translucent wings angled from its wet body like modern sculpture. No matter how hard John blew, the wing trembled but did not detach. Less than an hour until Nadja started playing. Everything that was serious, that truly mattered, waited on that piano bench.

Charles arrived untouched by the rain and was intercepted at the door by the rolling Hungarian of the gigantic super and the one-word punctuating assents of his tiny, denim-encased wife. "What's become of Madame Nostalgia?" Charles asked.

"I think Mark had enough of this place."

"He got that right. Did he leave anything to eat? Because I'm starved."

John stuffed the notebooks into a mesh sack the super's wife fetched for him, and he left the three others crowded in the abandoned apartment, preparing to negotiate. The wife stopped short, covered her mouth, and yelped at the indelicate photo collage.

He tried to angle his umbrella to shield himself and the journals from the majority of the rain, but his ankles were quickly soaked; he suddenly was wear-