His Czech friend Ivana had said languidly that in those times, entire sagas evolved around the attempt to get an apartment. People schemed and planned and paid bribes so they could leave home, where their grandparents, parents and siblings still lived together, sometimes even their in-laws. She herself had slept with the brother of a dead woman in order to get him to sublet his sister’s squalid bedsit. It had been illegal, of course, in a place where, for a long time, almost everything anyone could want had been illegal. Her occupation of the apartment had lasted a year before the man had evicted her for fear of being reported. And that had been in the aftermath of the fall of communism. After the aftermath.
The thing was that people like Ivana had a reason for feeling disconnected from the people around them. But he had never been poor, or politically oppressed, or even in much physical discomfort. He had never experienced the extremes of fear or anger or sorrow. His childhood had been pleasant, and when his parents died he had felt sad rather than grief-stricken, before burying them and going on to live a pleasant, even rather lucky life. He had no excuse for feeling alienated.
He glanced around the airport, feeling weary and slightly dehydrated. But not suicidal. Not over an apartment or an airport or because of being left by his wife. Not even because he was living a life in which he had taken hundreds of trips without ever feeling he had arrived. Once, years ago, he had told a guy at a party that he had never contemplated committing suicide. The guy had looked at him incredulously. How could anyone see the state of the world and not feel like killing themselves? he asked. Obviously the man thought him shallow, and Case had felt disturbed in some way he could not articulate, but when he told the story to Ivana, she laughed uproariously.
‘Petr is Hungarian! What can you expect? Hungarian is not a language in which to conduct normal conversations. It is a language only for suicide and poetry.’
Case had been fascinated by the idea of a language so tortured it could express only suicidal or poetic thoughts. He saw it as a poetic notion, until he overheard someone at a rap party say that the suicide rate among Hungarians was the fifth-highest in the world. That was the thing he liked about parties. The way you heard or misheard intriguing scraps. The way certain words got stuck in your head; this piquant phrase or that evocative awkwardness. He loved conversation – not taking part in it but witnessing it. Parties were perfect for that, because everyone wanted to talk and no one listened. He could be a stranger among them, listening and taking mental notes, and no one cared. He saw himself as a natural and instinctive witness of the world, which was perhaps why he’d been so troubled by the comment that a person who truly saw the world would be suicidal. Because Case felt like he saw far more than people who were deeply engaged in life. It was only that he did not feel suicide to be the natural or necessary consequence of his observations.
He thought of his ex-wife’s disgust at his passivity, and found himself looking at his watch. He did not want to know the time; it was a pose he often struck in an airport. It’s like I am performing for an unseen audience, he thought. He often had the feeling his life was some sort of performance. It even worked as a metaphor. You came out of the darkness of the womb into the limelight, and so began the performance that was life, which invariably ended with the curtain falling. Curtains. The only bit that really bothered him was the idea of coming to the end of the performance, without ever knowing what it was for. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble with endings in scripts. They felt contrived, because life did not come with full stops. Everything bled into everything else.
His problem with endings was why he had never made it to the big time, despite all the young playwright prizes and grants and the preliminary excitement of studios. He was known for being a very good scriptwriter who had trouble ending his scripts, to the frustration of his agent. Studios that took him on these days knew they would