Prague (53 page)

"It doesn't matter," saxman replied exprcssionlessly (nol much for eye contact outside of the jazz club). "It really doesn't fucking matter one fucking bit."

Back in the lobby, they compared winnings and Charles offered to drop people at their homes. "Oh, but we are staying here in the hotel," Krisztina reminded him.

"Of course. I'm sorry. I forgot completely. So then we'll say good evening to you. But, Imre. will you help me see the gentlemen home before I return you here?" And the men kissed Krisztina's cheek, then cycled through the revolving door into the snow, crowded into the same limo, and heard Charles give the driver the address for Leviticus as the empty second car trailed obediently behind.

Just inside the desert hut, the six men passed under the assessing eye of two muscled bouncers, gigantic Hungarians in short skirts, sandals, headpieces with sculpted snakes and vultures at the forehead, tubular beards wound with spiraling golden thread, and guns tastefully tucked in tunic waistbands. "Oh isn't this sexy," John said. "I'm already muz/ aroused." The palm trees swayed under the disco ball, and the tables were laid with plastic dishes of figs. No chairs, only rugs and throw pillows: The gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor, and their shoes were removed by women in golden bras and translucent silk trousers, which flared then gathered into slender golden anklels shaped like serpents devouring their own fake-jeweled tails. On either side of the sand-strewn stage, imposing video screens played a loop of climactic moments from classics of the world's intimate cinema, and after fifty minutes, one's sense of deja-vu could no longer be explained merely by the limited ways those climactic moments could be performed.

"Wow, what's best is the authenticity. Because this is how people lived in biblical times. I mean, of course, you know, really swinging people." John's voice was muffled by hand-fed figs.

Vaguely Middle Eastern music yowled over loudspeakers while, on the stage, a pantomime began. Two harem members—bound together and under

guard by a shirtless, none too Arabic man with a plastic scimitar—mimed anguish, pleaded silently for pity from their merciless guard. Soon an idea dawned on one of the two women, and very little time was lost before the scimitar was tossed aside, the guard was stripped, and the two harem members began negotiating their freedom with an unsurprising (and oddly uninspiring) form of ransom, while the audience smoked, drank eighteen-dollar fingers of Scotch, munched gritty figs, and had their shoulders rubbed and their hair tousled by staff in golden bras. This drama was performed nine times daily by the same company of commedia—two married couples, all childhood friends.

Here the service was aggressively competent. Charles was gold-carding the drinks, and refills came quickly, sometimes without even being ordered. "We have lots of new people we can fire starting next Monday, so don't worry," Charles said when people thanked him for drinklet after pricey drinklet. Harvey was unable to pull his eyes from the stage, trying to not even blink, but out of the side of his mouth he said to his assistant. "Didn't I tell you I'd show you amazing things if you came to work for me?" Two women Hanked Imrc, and he placed forint notes in the garment pouches designed to receive gratuities. Neville watched the stage with an expression of tremendously serious discernment, a litigator searching for the fatal flaw in a complex cross-examination.

"Jesus, what am I going to do with you people?" But John got no response, whispers swished from Imre to his partner, and a gesture was made to the maitrc d', and then a woman was straddling John's lap. Imrc raised a silent toast to John, and John smiled back with a head shake of strained amusement. Soon she evaporated.

A fake camel trotted across the little stage, and it bowed to the sand to allow another actor—an emir? the harem's owner? a brigand?—to descend and approach the writhing trio. With no physical evidence of arousal other than the flaccid expression of passion on his face, this new addition was soon nude and writhing too, to no apparent surprise on the part of the earlier entries. John pointed out to his colleagues that under a close reading, one could discern a certain lack of penetration in the performances and a certain softness in the definition of the male characters; they seemed unable to achieve the firm bonheur that the merry tone of the scene demanded. Scotch appeared in front of him and quickly disappeared like the smoke its flavor resembled. More whispered orders crackled from Imre to Charles to a waiter, and Charles apologized to Imrc for something unclear. Across the room, a bouncer irresistibly asked a drunken German to leave the club while a bikinied waitress stood by in a

HUM U L

cocked-hip, pursed-Iip attitude of violated dignity. The people of the desert formed a caravan. The German tourist tried to join it on his way to the exit. He was lifted by the hair and invited to the door. Behind the bar. a bottle broke and Hungarian obscenities spilled out. The people of the sands whirled like two clumsy quadruped dervishes.

"Your friends make you Christmas present," steamed into his ear in a vaguely Russian accent.

Charles laughed at the expression on John's face, but Imre nodded solemnly at John, accepting gratilude that had not yet been born. "You kids be home by ten." Charles said. "With the grateful compliments of Horvath Holdings."

The girl in the overcoat held his arm, but John turned back at the door for a last look at this sclerotic erotica. Everyone seemed at their ease in that palace of secondhand lust and thirdhand furnishings. One of the women sat on the table's edge, suspending herself over Horvath's lap with arachnid grace, her long bottle-and-booth-tanned legs arched angularly to form most of a hexagon and her toes pointed on the floor far to each side of the publisher. Her hands gripped the back of the old man's head; she bunched his silver hair between her ringers and moaned. She hunched her shoulders, threw back her own head, and pulled Horvath's face into her chest.

The limo left the two of them in front of John's Andrassy lit apartment, and John was still chuckling to himself as he turned the massive skeleton key in his building's front door lock. The hero of antityranny—the memory of the people—had boughl him a Kyrgyz hooker named Claudia, with feline eyes and a little Euro B.O. under a fruity perfume. They would have a cup of coffee and call it a night, and the next day he would show that he could take a joke, be one of the boys, do business the way it was done around here, evidently, and still maintain both self-respect and good genital health.

But then the girl removed her clothing with such velocity and facility that John realized how much more practiced strippers are at undressing than the average person, and his priorities shifted.

Later, the girl said. "Now I fake the finish for you, okay?" At first John thought she must have stumbled on a knotty vocabulary problem or that perhaps she was offering a special service of Scandinavian origin, but no: She stared up at him with the expression of a tired end-of-shift waitress. "Now, mister? Okay? Now? Okay?"

"Yes, fine. Jesus Christ, go ahead and—" But already her shouts and

moans were rattling John's picture frames, and a stream of Kyrgyz words filled his ear, conveniently foreign, translatable however he wished.

Unfortunately, a noticeable amount of time passed after her tour de force before John understood she was awaiting a similar finale from him; she was waiting to punch out. "Some other thing, mister? Some other thing?" John closed his eyes. In this new darkness, he imagined, as he thrashed himself against the girl, that he was thrashing himself against. . . this very same girl, the sole difference being that he was enjoying it. He pictured himself roaring with masculine, earthy pleasure, clawing at the very parts of her that he was in fact clawing at, but with a tactile shock and intensity he had never achieved in reality. The imagined girl watched him with eyes widening in growing excitement, and behind his closed eyes, John pictured his own eyes wide open and widening further as heat and electricity washed over him, poured fire from his spine and coccyx. He saw these two happy people enjoying each other with neither doubt nor second thought, living nowhere but in this nuclear embrace. He imagined their hands gripping each other until blood seeped crimson around the perforation her nails would make in his knuckles. He imagined the two bodies squeezing together tighter and tighter until all distance was erased.

To no avail. He opened his eyes and saw hers were impatiently open, too. His hands clutched the pillow behind her. "Some other thing, mister? Some other thing?"

"Shut the fuck up. I fucking told you no," he spat. He closed his eyes again and buried his head between her breasts, arched his back, and. with a groan, returned her favor and faked the Finnish, too.

THE
  
LAST
  
EVENING
  
OF
 
JOHN'S
  
1990:
  
JOHN
  
AND
  
NICKY
  
SHARED
  
A
  
STREET-

corner, lamp-lit kiss under sticky, fast-falling snow (turning from white to yellow then to white again as it crossed diagonally into and out of the lamplight). They descended into the crowded Blue Jazz as the American singer was dedicating the last song of his band's set—"Georgia on My Mind"—to the memory of Stalin. By the time John returned from the bar with three drinks, Nicky had already sat down and introduced herself to Nadja, and the two women were leaning across the table toward each other, overenunciating to make themselves heard over the slightly too loud music and chatter. "My darling boy. I al-

rnuuut i

ready like her so very much more than the filly with the jaw. May I touch your head, my girl?"

"The jaw?" Nicky asked her escort while bowing her head and allowing the ancient fingers to skim the texture of her scalp. "The jaw?"

"Never mind. Long story."

"I've heard so much about you," he heard Nicky saying. He was a little surprised to hear the self-proclaimed princess of candor produce something so tritely polite and lightly a lie, as he had never told her anything at all about Nadja.

To go back: John's New Year's expedition had begun a few hours earlier in the BudapesToday newsroom, where people wandered around their own desks, shy among co-workers they had seen every day for months and months. With Charles and Harvey off skiing in Switzerland ("Swiss misses give frosty kisses," Harvey had said unprovoked while Charles, out of view, rolled his eyes), John felt a real ache, hoping Nicky would turn up. He could not stomach setting off into 1991 with any of the others, not even Karen Whitley, who had lately donned a transparent attitude of jaded, sophisticated, take-il-or-leave-it disappointment, laced with a golden thread of ironic guilt-mongcring, dusted all over with a heady vanilla body-spray scent of still-availability.

Passing a dull hour at this office party—listening to four co-workers' similar movie plots and Karen's alternating insinuations and scorn—he finally saw Nicky. He gave her the chance to smell for herself how fetid the overgrown earth of this gathering had become, then took her aside, asked her to travel with him across a liquorish sea to the sunny, welcoming coast of 1991— a green and promising country rich with sweet, orange, fibrous fruits and red berries shaped like tiny nipples, an island of unsurpassed happiness, where in fact (here he bit her ear) he quite seriously expected to be named king, a happy, naked king beloved for his munificence and slightly feared for his unpredictable appetites. He confessed to her what her nose had already reported: He had already set sail on his boozy crossing. She would have to swim a ways to catch up, but he was willing to wail.

Before they could escape. Editor stood on a desk chair holding a plastic cup of cheap Hungarian white and painted a picture of "prahspruss toims ahett," while the two seafarers grabbed each other's groins behind a screen of computer monitors but in view maintained profound, wrinkle-browed interest in the remarks of their chief. She agreed to voyage with him; she tickled his

302
 
!
 
AKTHUK
 
KHILtll'S

Adam's apple with her nails and whispered her assent in his ear. He smiled at her. She was probably, he realized, his closest friend on the entire continent. In persistently asking nothing of him, in repeatedly rejecting his offers of anything resembling emotion or affection, she had become (he saw in the fluorescent light of these cramped offices) overpoweringly important to him. (He was far enough into his evening's cruise to grow sentimental—but not so far that he could not recognize if and excuse it as the inevitable and acceptable response to the shimmering, whispering, accelerating rush of 1990s dwindling hourglass sand.)