"You're American?" said another man excitedly, turning toward her from the next table. "This is very different from America. I know. I've been here two weeks." He paused dramatically, then said, "The people do not know how to make a profit."
The violinist was playing loudly, vibrantly, and quite out of tune. He is doing this on purpose, Margaret thought. He has tuned his violin to be out of tune. He hates us. Are they really playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik with a snare drum?
"I'm from L.A.," the man at the next table was saying. "Los Angeles," he explained to the Belgians.
He was a degenerate-looking man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty-five, his skin leathery and drawn, an alarming, inhuman yellowish tan, and his eyes glowed from deep sockets, lifeless, meaningless, but shining bright, as if someone had gone out and forgotten to turn them off.
"Ah! Los Angeles! In Los Angeles, they put the Mexican people in jail, I think," said the juge.
The American had turned so far toward them that he was able to put his long tan fingers on their table. "I'm a photographer so I notice things," he said. "Take for example your table setting. Not being photographers, you probably haven't noticed, but I've been trained to notice. Now we're in a nice restaurant, in a classy hotel, right? We're being served by guys in monkey suits. They've got all this silver." He lifted Margaret's fork by the tines, as Margaret watched with stunned attention, held it up for all to see, then lifted her glass. "This is real crystal, I'll tell you," he said, pinging the glass, her glass, with the fork, her fork, then shaking his head. "You ever hear of Bohemian crystal? But what's missing? You don't notice, right? But I pick up on things, and these people don't know how to make a profit. Why? Because for all those years, their bosses said, Just fill your quotas, just fill your quotas. So they'd sell ten shirts, then quit for the day. They don't care that fifty more people are standing in a line waiting for shirts and that they have one hundred shirts left in the store. They don't care. They filled their quotas! See my point?" He had returned Margaret's glass, but still held her fork in one hand, thumping it on the white tablecloth. His voice had a thin, droning rhythm, not unlike water dripping from a faucet.
"So," he continued, "what is missing from the table in this elegant restaurant? The salt and pepper! With all their crystal and silver, they leave off the salt and pepper. Then you have to ask for it and then they have to go and fetch it, which keeps the waiter from doing something else, which means someone else has to sit around with no dinner, which means these people are inefficient. I mean no disrespect, of course, they're a decent people. We just have to teach them."
Margaret lifted her Baedeker's to reveal a small crystal salt shaker and a small crystal pepper shaker.
"Hey!" said the sinewy photographer with his dying, smoldering eyes, as if this discovery somehow proved his point. "We're in Eastern Europe."
"No, no," cried the small Belgian man.
"Oui! Oui!" said his small Belgian wife, in agreement with whom, Margaret was unsure.
"No, no," the Belgian man continued. "This is not Eastern Europe, you know, but central Europe. Historically, central Europe. Central, central. Here was the home of Kafka and Dvorák of course, but also Rilke and Smetana and, too, Kepler and Einstein and Alphonse Mucha! Central, you see?"
The violinist was clumping painfully among the tables now, asking for requests. Haven't you filled your quota yet? Margaret wondered. A large table of Germans waited while most of the waiters in the restaurant assisted in preparing a preposterously large brandy glass, holding it over a flame, then pouring a thimbleful of brandy in, lighting it, and blowing it out. Why it took so many waiters to perform this ritual, as only one was active at a time—the thimble pourer waited for the glass heater to finish, then passed the glass in turn to the brandy lighter, who gave it to the brandy blower-outer, who passed it on to various servers—was not immediately clear.
"See what I mean?" the American photographer said, nodding his head toward the waiters. "Inefficient."
But no one in the restaurant seemed to mind, everyone watching the procedure in fascination.
"Oui! Oui!" said the Belgian man and the Belgian lady together, cheerfully observing the blue flames.
"Nice people," the American said, shaking his head. "Nice little country."
Margaret looked at him, twisted in his chair in his determination to speak to them, and she hoped that suddenly, like a wound-up rubber band when it is at last released, he would spin back to face the other way. But of course he didn't, he simply continued chatting. He had a terrible cold, which he referred to as the Prague Plague, and he sniffed a great deal.
"In Prague," said the Belgian wistfully, "I think only political dissidents are put in jail. That is, they used to be, have been, were put in jail. Who now is being put in the jail? Who now?"