David Szalay: All That Man Is

Her eyes again.

‘He know nah-thing but football,’ she says. He is looking at her mouth when she says that. ‘You understand me.’ It does not seem to be a question this time. It sounds more like an instruction.

‘And you young boys,’ she says, smiling happily, taking up the brandy bottle, ‘you like sport?’

‘I do,’ Ferdinand tells her.

‘Yes?’

‘Simon doesn’t.’

‘That’s not true,’ Simon mutters irritably.

She doesn’t seem to hear that. She says, turning to him, ‘Oh, no? What do you like? What do you like? I think I know what you like!’ And, putting her hand on his knee again, she starts to laugh.

‘Simon likes books,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Oh, you like books! That’s nice . I like books! Oh —’ she puts her hand on her heart — ‘I love books. My husband, he don’t like books. He is not interested in art. You are interested in art, I think?’

‘He’s interested in art,’ Ferdinand confirms.

‘Oh, that’s nice !’ With her eyes on Simon, she sighs. ‘Beauty,’ she says. ‘Beauty, beauty. I live for beauty. Look, I show you.’

Full of excitement, she takes him to a painting hanging in the hall. A flat, lifeless landscape in ugly lurid paint. She tells him she got it in Venice.

‘It’s nice,’ he says.

They stand there for a minute in silence.

He is aware, as he stares at the small terrible picture, of her standing next to him, of her hand warm and heavy on his shoulder.

‘Your friend,’ she says to Ferdinand, lighting another cigarette, ‘he understands.’ They are in the kitchen again.

‘He’s very intelligent,’ Ferdinand says.

‘He understands beauty.’

‘Definitely.’

‘He lives for beauty. He is like me.’ And then she says again, unscrewing the cap of the brandy bottle, ‘My husband, he know nothing but football.’

‘The beautiful game,’ Ferdinand jokes.

She laughs, though it isn’t clear whether she understood his joke. ‘You like football?’ she asks.

‘I’m more of a rugby man actually,’ Ferdinand says.

He then tries to explain what rugby is, while she smokes and listens, and occasionally asks questions that show she hasn’t understood anything.

‘So is like football?’ she asks, waving away some smoke, after several minutes of detailed explanation.

‘Uh. Sort of,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Yes.’

‘And girls?’ she asks. ‘You like girls?’

The question embarrasses Ferdinand less than it does Simon, and he says, after a short pause, ‘Of course we like girls.’

She laughs again. ‘Of course!’

She is looking at Simon, who is staring at the table. She says, ‘You will find lot of girls in Prague.’

—

Standing on the Charles bridge with its blackened statues, its pointing tourists, Simon pronounces the whole place to be a soulless Disneyland.

In St Vitus cathedral, wandering around in the quiet light and the faint smell of wood polish, he sees a poster for a performance of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor there later that afternoon which marginally perks him up, and when they have acquired tickets, they sit down on the terrace of a touristy pub opposite the cathedral’s flank to wait.

Unusually for him, Ferdinand is smoking a cigarette, one of Simon’s Philip Morrises. While his friend tells him how much he hates Prague, Ferdinand notices two young women sitting at a nearby table. They are not, perhaps, the lovelies their landlady had promised — they are okay, though. More than okay, one of them. He tries to hear what they are saying, to hear what language they are speaking. They are not locals, obviously.

‘How can you be happy as a tourist?’ Simon is saying. ‘Always wandering around, always at a loose end, searching for things…’

‘You’re in a good mood.’

‘I’m not in a bad mood — I’m just saying…’

The girls seem to be English. ‘What about them ?’ Ferdinand says quietly.

‘What about them?’ Simon asks.

‘Well?’

Simon makes a face, a sort of pained or impatient expression.

‘Oh, come on!’ Ferdinand says. ‘They’re not that bad. They’re alright. They’re nicer than the ones in Warsaw.’

‘Well, that’s not hard…’

‘Well, I am , if you know what I mean.’ Ferdinand laughs. ‘I’m going to ask them to join us.’

Simon sighs impatiently and, his hands shaking slightly, lights another cigarette. He watches as Ferdinand, with enviable ease, slides over to the girls and speaks to them. He points to the table where Simon is sitting, and Simon quickly looks away, looks up at the reassuring blackened Gothic bulk of St Vitus. He is still looking at it, or pretending to, when Ferdinand’s voice says, ‘This is my friend Simon.’

He turns into the sun, squints. They are standing there, holding their drinks. One of them is wearing a sun hat. Ferdinand gestures for them to sit down, which they do, uncertainly. ‘So,’ Ferdinand says, taking a seat himself, with a loud scraping noise and a sort of exaggerated friendliness, ‘how do you like Prague? How long have you been here? We only arrived this morning — we haven’t seen much yet, have we, Simon?’

Simon shakes his head. ‘No, not really.’

‘We had a look in there,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Simon likes cathedrals.’ The girls give him a quick glance, as if expecting him to confirm or deny this, but he says nothing. ‘Have you been in there?’ Ferdinand asks, directing his question particularly to the one in the sun hat, who is much more attractive than her friend.

‘Yeah, yesterday,’ she says.

‘Quite impressive, isn’t it.’

She laughs. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, as if she thinks Ferdinand might have been joking.

‘I mean, they’re all the same, I suppose,’ he says. ‘We’ve been to pretty much every one in this part of Europe, so I can say that with some authority.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘So where else have you been then?’ she asks.

And so they start talking — where have you been, what have you seen.

Simon is irritated by Ferdinand’s manner. He thinks of it as a sort of mask that his friend puts on for encounters with strangers, as if there were somehow an intrinsic hypocrisy to it, and thinks of his own silence as a protest against this hypocrisy. And also against the tediousness of it all — when Sun Hat’s plump friend asks him what kind of music he likes, he just shrugs and says he doesn’t know.

Ferdinand is telling the story of the Japanese couple they saw — he in linen suit and panama hat, she in turquoise dress with sparkles — dancing in the main square of Kraków. Then he tells the story of how he and Simon were hauled off the train at the Polish — German border to be searched by moustached German officials. ‘I think they were particularly suspicious of Simon,’ he says, with a smile, successfully provoking mirth in the ladies, and Simon also smiles, palely, without pleasure, accepting the part that has, he feels, been forced on him.

‘Full-on strip search,’ Ferdinand says.

Sun Hat squeals with shocked laughter. ‘What, seriously?’

‘No,’ Simon says, without looking at her. And then he announces, speaking very specifically to Ferdinand, as if they were alone, ‘It’s nearly five.’

‘Is it?’ Ferdinand asks, as if he doesn’t understand why Simon is telling him that.

‘Yes,’ Simon says. There is a short silence. ‘You know, the…’

‘Yeah,’ Ferdinand says. He seems to think for a moment, while the others wait. Then he turns to Sun Hat. ‘Listen, there’s this concert at five. It should be quite amazing. Why don’t you come with us?’