Goulash Read online

  ALSO BY BRIAN KIMBERLING

  Snapper

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Brian Kimberling

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Kimberling, Brian, author.

  Title: Goulash / Brian Kimberling.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2019

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025630 | ISBN 9780307908070 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9780307908087 (ebook).

  Classification: LCC PS3611.I4576 G68 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018025630

  Ebook ISBN 9780307908087

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover images: (beer) Chris Stein/Getty Images; (Old Town Hall, Prague) Vrabelpeter1/Getty Images

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Brian Kimberling

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Rosary

  Wild West

  Good Soldier

  Trust

  Goulash

  Kitten Heads

  Erotic City

  Pigeon 1 (A)

  Pigeon 2 (B)

  Triumph

  Des Moines

  Part II

  Brothers

  Allegro, Larghetto

  Carrot Clarinet

  Hero

  Nil Nisi Rectum

  Standing Rule

  Map of Prague

  Soviet Squirrels

  Velikonoce

  Revolution

  The Astronomer’s Nose

  Coffee with Milk

  VIP

  Part III

  Smetana

  Suicide

  Mazurka

  Flood

  Reflections

  Cold War

  Tumbleweed

  Laundry Lines

  When You Need Help

  Mom

  Tennis

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  What can we do? It is so far from one nation to another; all of us are more and more lonely. You’d better never stick your nose out of your house again; better to lock the gate and close the shutters, and now others can wish us well as much as they like! I have finished with everyone. And now you can close your eyes and softly, quite softly, keep saying: How do you do, old sir in Kent? Grüß Gott, meine Herren! Grazie, signor! À votre sante!

  —KAREL ČAPEK, Greetings, published December 25, 1938

  PART I

  ROSARY

  First it was my shoes. They went missing from outside my flat, where I left them slathered in mud after a lonely late-winter walk through the countryside northwest of Prague. I bought a new pair and forgot the old until they appeared two weeks later in the window of an art gallery, as part of an installation with an asking price of over six thousand dollars, converted from Czech crowns.

  At least they had been cleaned. On the other hand holes had been drilled through the soles so that they could be strung like beads with other shoes and a number of books onto a vertical rope fastened to a repurposed manhole cover on the gallery’s hardwood floor and affixed at the top to the ceiling. The resulting column sagged lightly as it rose. My shoes had become part of an exotic and erudite tree. I couldn’t be sure they were mine without closer examination, so I went inside.

  In small print under the price tag I saw that the artist responsible for Rosary went only by the initials D.K. My shoes were of extravagant American provenance compared to the evidently Central and Eastern European shoes; moreover they were size 14, sensibly deployed near the bottom of the tree, and sandwiched between something in German and a military history book in English. All of the shoes and books looked used. All the major European languages were represented. The shoes were black and brown; the books red and blue and purple and orange.

  At a desk in a corner sat a compact individual of indeterminate gender with shoulder-length sandy hair and a pale face, delicate hands emerging from a man’s shirtsleeves splayed on the desk. I hoped they spoke English.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You have my shoes in your window.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” they said, distinctly more tenor than alto.

  “I’m sure I’m not,” I said.

  “I’m sure the artist in question steals only the shoes of other artists.”

  “My shoes went missing two weeks ago and now they’re in your window. I can prove that they are mine.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “My name is inside them.”

  “And why is your name inside them?”

  “My mother put it there.”

  He raised a lone eyebrow. I began to feel like a suspect accused of an unspecified crime.

  “I see. And how old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “This mother, she travels with you?”

  “No.”

  “Shame. She could perhaps teach you not to insult people in European art galleries.”

  “It says Elliott Black on the inside tongue of each shoe. Little label she stitched in. Just have a look.”

  “If you wish to purchase the item you can do whatever you like with it.” He seemed pained behind the comic façade, as if he had never met an American with such limited funding that a pair of shoes could be a matter of legitimate concern.

  “I don’t want the shoes back now. They’re ruined. But I would like to know how they got here.”

  “You say your shoes were stolen?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. Crime in our country is not like crime in your country.”

  “What does that even mean?” I said. I could also see that in his country the customer was not always right.

  “I can’t help you, Mr. Black. You are just visiting?”

  “I teach English.”

  “You are a lucky man. How long have you been here?”

  “About a month.”

  “Then you have noticed that Prague is full of statues. Where there are statues there are artists. You can’t be too careful with your shoes.”

  “That isn’t even a statue,” I said.

  “Would you call it a monument?”

  “I’ll bet those are all library books, too. I bet they have labels.”

  “Sadly, investigating your hypothesis would entail dismantling the object.”

  “How can I track down this D.K. and ask how come he stole my shoes?”

  “Are artists tracked down in America? How very enlightening. Perhaps you could lure him into a trap with more shoes.”


  “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

  He made an elaborate show of looking around. In profile he had long sideburns and an improbably long, sharp nose. He reminded me of a meerkat sentry tasting the wind.

  “I see no one.”

  I looked around, too. The gallery also contained a working pram made from papier-mâché pornography, a large wax bust of Lenin laughing, and several glass articles of no obvious appeal or utility. The remaining space was devoted to paintings.

  “If you would like to complain to the manager,” he said, “I am listening.”

  “You have to admit that I have a mystery here,” I said.

  “Are your shoes comfortable?”

  “What?”

  “The ones you are wearing.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The square toe suits you,” he said. “I generally think of Americans as sneaker people.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Cowboy boots.”

  “Touché,” he said.

  “Do you have a name?” I said.

  “Certainly, Mr. Black. I am Mr. Cimarron.”

  “Well, Mr. Cimarron, if you would tell Mr. D.K. that Mr. Black is annoyed I’d appreciate it.”

  “I do not actually know that D.K. is a man,” he said. “My assistant handles weekend deliveries. Perhaps I infer it from the phallic nature of the work. Would you call it furniture?”

  “I would call it my shoes.”

  “The way it droops as it rises does suggest some performance anxiety, don’t you think?”

  I was compelled to look at it again. Every shoe was polished and every book spine uncracked; I could almost imagine somebody wanting it at the end of the sofa in a living room somewhere. Around it instead were gleaming floorboards, immaculate walls, a spotless window; outside young men and women in sportswear laughing, cars honking, history erased and replaced by this absurd artifact with no immediate meaning that I could detect.

  “I prefer to think of it as a tree,” I said.

  “A tree with performance anxiety. Your ideas are fascinating. Would you call it an entity?”

  “I’d be dazzled if anyone created a thing that isn’t an entity.”

  “Yet we can create entities that are not things.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Or can we? You’re the English teacher.”

  “Fine,” I said. “The rain is a thing that falls on the plain, mainly, also a thing, of Spain, which is more of an entity.”

  “You illustrate my point beautifully. Poor Spain can’t fall on anything.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as a point. And the plain is going to have trouble with that, too.”

  “Is a point an entity or a thing?”

  “Yes.”

  We glared at each other.

  “I don’t suppose you want to tell me the point of the thing,” I said, pointing at it.

  He shrugged.

  “To make money, of course.”

  WILD WEST

  My flat was on a tram-addled boulevard opposite shops with windows tricked out in funky and dignified words I couldn’t read or pronounce. Cimarron’s art gallery was about two tram stops away. Otherwise there wasn’t anything artsy to my eye about the neighborhood. It was stuck in the past like the rest of the country, with identical menus in every restaurant, posters of footballers dated 1984 in every pub, and men in ancient dungarees operating forklifts on the sidewalks. Things had changed in the city center with the influx of Western tourists and cash—Prague and Warsaw were competing to see who could build the first moneymaking museum of communism—but I lived in an outpost of stagnation, beneath a charming and oppressive air of Slavic mystery.

  The next morning on my way to teach I saw a pair of stone legs and sandaled feet sticking out of a metal garbage can. Closer inspection suggested someone had dismantled a statue with a sledgehammer. Stone wasn’t the word—it was some form of concrete with bits of thick wire armature protruding from each severed limb. A woman’s head with half a nose lay between the thighs at the bottom of the can, a forearm and hand propped up against that. An adjacent can contained her torso, and the other arm. Both cans held a depth of rubble and dust.

  A corrugated metal shutter covered in graffiti was the only clue that there was a studio from which she had come. Everything else in the area was resolutely residential: curtained windows and door-side ranks of buttons for flats one through forty. I stood still, watching people for a while. I saw a lanky boy carrying his football, and a manifestly bored mother dragging her toddler around, two elderly gentlemen out for a morning stumble, and, finally, the trash collectors, who slung the dismembered figure unceremoniously and without comment into the back of their truck.

  I had become attuned to the sounds of my neighborhood. Any tapping, buzzing, blasting noise suggested someone somewhere hard at work, but before I could figure out where exactly, another tram clattered by, drowning out all other noise. Yet visual evidence came and went like signs of spring. A life-sized wooden bear evidently carved with a chainsaw stood outside the grocery store for two days, then vanished. Small bicycles made from twisted wire coat hangers appeared dangling from street signs and traffic lights. The shop window of an antiques store featured an enormous desk spangled with spoons and keys. Twice I saw a small marble obelisk strapped to the roof of a car.

  * * *

  —

  I taught about half my lessons in a pub over beer and cigarettes, writing American slang on napkins. It was incredibly demoralizing. I had worked hard and paid well for my teaching certification. I had imagined working with motivated students and being a good ambassador for my country, as my mother put it, by which she meant say “please” and “thank you.” Instead I got bored midlevel insurance executives who just wanted to chat. English lessons were tedious company policy, and attendance was correspondingly poor. For a given class only one or two students bothered to show. Meanwhile the full might and majesty of the American legal system was conducting DNA tests on a blue dress from the Gap. My students’ curiosity on the subject was excruciating, particularly if I had prepared a lesson on, say, reported speech, but they peppered me with questions instead.

  Teaching English felt mostly like leading parlor games at children’s parties, except my students weren’t children, paid little attention, and got virtually nothing out of the experience. I would ask them, for example, to write, “I am not a nice person,” followed by three to five sentences illustrating the thesis. Then I would ask them to swap pronouns on the fly (“You are not a nice person, and here’s why…”). It was a good exercise for subject-verb agreement, and I enjoyed the way we seemed to be flipping verbal rocks to see what lived under them. The benefit for my students was spending an hour away from a spreadsheet, and not much more.

  Ivan Biskup came consistently, which surprised me as he was senior among them and thus presumably busy. Milan Jezdec and Vlasta Havran were the other two most constant. Milan was athletic and in his midthirties with a seemingly terminal case of ennui. He told me early on that when he was not on a tennis court he was bored. Vlasta was very diffident and drank only half pints. Her hair was amorphous, wiry, and a shade of brown closest to dark grey. Her nose had been broken in a car accident and never set itself right afterward. In a bad mood she looked like an extra from some documentary film about the horrors of totalitarianism, yet when she smiled she was strikingly lovely.

  In any case, Ivan could authorize lessons in the Golden Lion. This particular pub’s décor was still a thoroughly drab arrangement for an oppressed people, a place for communist commiseration rather than capitalist celebration. The tables and chairs were on their last legs, and the walls decorated strictly with nicotine. Still, it was preferable to an empty boardroom, and an essential component, Ivan said, of my own intercultural education. Czech history and culture, he added, are best appreciated
in a pint glass.

  Ivan explained local idiosyncrasies to me, like the way Czech men enter buildings before their female companions “in case there’s a fight,” which suggested to me that I had in fact moved to the Wild West. He also hazarded a guess about the shattered statue: that if three or four Prague artists lived in close proximity they doubtless spent most of their time and energy sabotaging each other’s work and framing the other guy.

  We had installed ourselves once I arrived over a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and when the waitress appeared I tried out my Czech. She was petite, blonde, very pretty, and about eighteen. She turned as red as the tablecloth checkers and ran away. Ivan slapped his thigh.

  “I know what you were trying to say,” he said. “It just sounded like I think you know what I want, baby.”

  She did return with my Czech beer of choice. I had only been there six weeks. The beer was Velkopopovický Kozel, which Ivan translated as “the Goat from Greater Popovitz.” Weak and slightly metallic, it was perfect for daytime drinking.

  I told my students about the legs.

  “You are a lucky man,” they said.

  Living in Žižkov was like living in Brooklyn, they told me. I wondered what pirated movies their conception of Brooklyn came from, and I privately thought the comparison more aspirational than accurate. Žižkov was either very working class or very Bohemian or both, with a reputation for spontaneous brawling. Also, unlike Brooklyn, Žižkov was named after a one-eyed mace-wielding general who 575 years previously had slaughtered hundreds of Catholics in nearby Kutná Hora and hurled their corpses into the local silver mines. The statue of him on a hill in the middle of Žižkov was the best-endowed equestrian statue in the world.