Cafe Europa by Ed Ifkovic Page B

“I understand Endre Molnár, my dear. Like other Hungarians, he is a radical at heart. He’s waiting for the war. They wait for Franz Josef to die. No one yells, ‘ Éljen a király! Long live the king!’ unless ordered to do so. The fact that Cassandra will marry that fussy, pretentious Count Frederic—that pasteboard royal mask—only makes folks like Endre more radical. Sit with him late at night with a couple bottles of Bull’s Blood wine from Eger, and he’ll tell you his soul.”
    â€œI don’t have time for such revelations,” I said.
    He snickered. “Well, I wasn’t inviting you, my dear. Men have province where…” His voice trailed off.
    â€œAnd so it goes,” Winifred concluded.
    But Harold ignored her.“I only got a few minutes before I gotta head to the telegraph office on Andrássy. The New York Journal needs my column.”
    I recalled meeting him at the 1912 Republican Convention in Chicago. He interviewed everyone, even me. “Edna Ferber just walked in…she’s wearing pearls. ‘Are those pearls real, Miss Ferber?’ ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course, I paid $1.29 for them at Montgomery Ward…’” That paragraph followed by a revelatory quotation from Teddy Roosevelt about his newly formed Progressive Party. A satiric barb aimed at William Howard Taft. A smorgasbord of the sublime and the ridiculous.
    So, perhaps, Harold Gibbon might be Hearst’s most inventive reporter.
    Preparing to depart, he couldn’t resist a farcical account of his battles with the creaky dumbwaiter in his room on the second floor of the hotel. I’d already had my own battles with that contraption. In the ancient rooms everything worked…sporadically. Sometimes the telephone would—most times it didn’t. “I called down to the kitchen for tea,” Harold said, “and they send it up by the dumbwaiter. A bell rings. I open the door. The tea goes up half a floor, spills, the bell rings again, the tea comes back, most of it spilled.”
    â€œWell, I gave up,” I admitted. “I feel I’m in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in this hotel.”
    He wasn’t through. “I open the panel door and I hear someone in the kitchen complaining about me wanting tea so late at night. I hear Markov telling György he’s an ass, just like everyone in Markov’s wife’s family, and he’s not supposed to stare at the pretty girls with his tongue wagging out of his mouth. I missed most of it because it’s a dialectical Hungarian or something, but György says he will marry a pretty girl someday and…”
    â€œWhat is the point of this?” Winifred interrupted.
    But I was laughing. “As I said, I gave up. I called down for coffee with whipped cream—ordered it in perfect German—and a strange voice says ‘Ja ja ja, mein Herr’ and I scream, ‘Herr?’ and the voice says, ‘ Ja ja .’ I gave up. Then the bell rings and I open the door to find a tea biscuit on a tray. When I was first shown the room, the bellboy kept pointing at a garish painting of Franz Josef, eye level and out of place, the emperor an old balding man, and I kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Finally, to show me, he unlatched the panel holding the painting and opened up the dumbwaiter.”
    Hurt, Winifred defended the hotel. “Franz Josef’s redundant painting aside, the old rooms have…a coziness to them.”
    Harold grimaced. “When the war comes, those paintings of Franz Josef that seem to be in every room—mine shows him as a young man on horseback, which I believe he never was—will be gone. Burned in a pyre of celebration.”
    â€œAnd my cup of coffee will still be going to the wrong floor.”
    Harold waved his typed sheets at us. “I’m off. America awaits my words.” He performed a little