The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [226]
“Ó kér egy rumkólát,” Gábor said to the stone-faced waitress. Unresponsive, she walked off.
“Jesus. What did you say to her?”
“Nothing.” Gábor shrugged. “I said you wanted another rum-and-Coke.”
“Well, she looks pissed off,” John said with a sigh. “It’s probably because I’m so obviously a Jew.”
While physically his self-assessment was undeniably true, his grim assessment of anti-Semitism in Hungarian waitresses killed the mood at the table. His blond, blue-eyed, pug-nosed brother grudgingly consoled him, “No, waiters and waitresses here are all like that. They do it to me, too.”
“Well, one way or the other, that’s my turn,” said John, and Gábor let out a small and condescending whistle of appreciation at an excellent play, for a beginner.
Sincerity seemed to have sprung fully formed from Charles Gábor’s head, and among the younger Americans, Canadians, and Britons first trickling then flooding into Budapest in 1989–90, the game’s popularity was one of the few common interests of an otherwise unlikely society. Charles had explained the rules in October ’89, the very evening of his arrival in the city his parents had always told him was his real home. He played it late that jet-lagged night with a group of Americans in a bar near the University of Budapest, and the game spread throughout the anglophones “like a mild but incurable social disease,” in Scott’s words. The virus left the sticky table and was carried to English-as-a-Second-Language-school faculties, folk and jazz bandmates, law-firm junior partners. It was laughingly explained and daily played by embassy interns and backpacking tourists, artists and poets and screenwriters and other new (and often well-endowed) bohemians, and by the young Hungarians who befriended these invaders, voyeurs, naïfs, social refugees. Each day, Sincerity proliferated as Budapest began squeaking with new people eager to see History in the making or to cash in on a market in turmoil or to draw artistic inspiration from the untapped source of a Cold War–torn city or merely to enjoy a rare and fleeting conjunction of place and era when being American, British, Canadian could be exotic, though one sensed such a potent license would expire far too soon.
ROUND TWO
CHARLES LOOKED STERNLY AT JOHN WITH AN EXPRESSION MEANT TO CONVEY a sense of “you’re not going to like this, but I have to speak the truth” and said, “ There will come a point, after this initial post-Communist exuberance wears off, when the Hungarians will realize that you can have too much democracy. They’ll realize they need a slightly stronger hand at the helm, and they’ll make the right choice: a strong Hungary with a real national-corporatist philosophy.” He paused, gazed hard at John and Scott, and concluded, “Like they had in the early forties.”
Mark: “As my dad always said, one’s pain should always be held in perspective. There is always someone worse off than yourself. That’s a perennial comfort.”
Emily: “The world contains more nice people than mean people. I really believe that.” John could see she plainly did believe that, and he knew that this basic faith, rare and extraordinary, was precisely what he lacked and needed in order to live a full and important life. He also loved that the duress of telling two lies right off the bat had been too much for Emily, and now she faced the daunting prospect of producing two in a row to finish.
Scott, not really up for the game at its highest levels, turned to bland possibilities: “I like Pest better than Buda.” He lived and worked in the Buda hills, across