Prague by Arthur Phillips

on the corner. I don't want to live anywhere else."
     
    "Don't be silly. No one is going to make you leave this house, but someday you will want to, because they will give your apartments back to you and you will be very proud to have such lovely homes in your hometown."
     
    While the little boy sat on the floor with his toy soldiers and dreaded being forced out of his house, his parents described his two apartments, and as they did, they left the places they had been standing (near the fire, near the cocktail cart), came across the room to each other, and lay down on the couch, his fa-
     
    ther's arm around his mother's neck. They stared at the ceiling and whispered details of their apartments to each other in quieter and quieter tones until Charles could not hear them at all, and he was relieved to be left alone to play on the floor of his house, in the company of his friend the cat, Imre Nagy (Big Jim, as he introduced him to friends). The cat had lived in that house longer than Charles himself, and would, nightly, pounce on and bat from paw to paw one of Charles's soldiers, a shiny silver knight with a sword. The glint of it attracted the cat, and though he ignored the rest of the tiny military forces, that knight was nip.
     
    "Four flights of stairs, sixty-four steps top to bottom, and in the courtyard an elm tree. The boy would be climbing it today. You hear, Karoly? A tree in your—oh never mind, he's lost in his soldiers ..."
     
    "The tiles meant to look like a Byzantine mosaic... I'm sure some Red bastard has smashed..."
     
    As he grew up, however, none of his parents' dictates or practices could protect him from the flood of English words and American habits. Friends, movies, school, books, television: Cleveland and Hollywood occupied far more of the known world than did that unknown faraway city, the black-and-white stories of long ago, the confusing, urgent, parochial politics, and the language none of his friends could speak but which several of them compared to a slimy alien's gurgling in Star Wars.
     
    The boy handed down the sentence of banishment three years prior to its execution: At age nine he announced to his parents that he was tired of people calling him Ca-RO-lee rather than KAR-oy and therefore he would henceforth be called Charles, a dictate happily accepted by everyone he knew except his parents; but he was twelve when Hungarian words finally grew less familiar than English ones. Twelve-year-old Karoly the Hungarian lived dormant inside Charles the Ohioan throughout high school, college, and business school, unnecessary, unnoticed, unwelcome.
     
    His Hungarian stopped developing when he was twelve but clung to him like a vestigial appendage. He spoke Hungarian only in occasional private conversations with his parents in front of third parties. And with this linguistic divide came an inevitable cultural one. His father in particular began to see Charles as a foreigner who needed education to be restored to his heritage.
     
    'Admiral Horthy was misunderstood," his father lectured him after disgustedly tossing aside Charles's eleventh-grade history textbook and its single mention of Hungary's appearance in the Second World War, included in a side-
     
    bar list of Other Fascist Countries. 'Americans have no appetite for anything other than black or white. There were more than merely bad guys and good guys. It wasn't a cowboys-and-Indians John Wayne movie, you understand? Tell that to your ridiculous teacher. Horthy kept the Nazis out as long as he could and fought the Russians. Who else does your little school think could do that? Churchill? Incidentally, you might inform your teacher of what passes for history in this country that the proper term for that act of rape on page 465 is Trianon."
     
    But having bided his time, Karoly the Hungarian awoke one day. The 1989 revolutions in Central Europe and Charles's omnipresent belief that he was destined for something better than his classmates