by Caleb Crain
In the West, gays had woken up to politics later than other groups had, and it occurred to Jacob that he might not have arrived too late for the liberation of Eastern Europe’s gay people. He hadn’t settled in advance on the story he hoped to hear, but he did expect to recognize it if he came across it, and so when Luboš agreed to go home with him and began, during the tram ride, to tell a little more of his personal story, he listened with a certain partiality, an effort at recognition.
The effort was frustrated. Luboš’s story seemed to have no politics at all. In fact he seemed to have failed in a few instances to appreciate the freedoms that history had dropped in his lap. Luboš told him, for example, that the French businessman, the one whom Jacob had studied in T-Club, had recently taken him to Alsace for a couple of months so he could learn French, in order to improve communication between the two of them. (They were business partners, it turned out; Jacob had been mistaken in thinking the Frenchman was Luboš’s employer.) Luboš had hated the language classes and had stopped going to them. He had also taken his time about telling his partner that he had quit—had hidden in coffee shops, where he could read none of the newspapers, and in clothing stores, where he could afford none of the clothes, utterly bored—and they had had a vehement argument after the inevitable discovery, and Luboš had come back to Prague much sooner than planned. The two men had remained partners, however. Georges—his name was Georges Collin—did speak German, though with difficulty, and he wanted a foot in the Czech door very badly. It was not yet legal for a foreigner to run a business like Collin’s in his own name, and he did not think he could afford to wait for the law to change. There were many small but crucial tasks, such as renting an office or installing a telephone, that a Czech could navigate more adeptly than a foreigner, and, as in every business, a web of local negotiations was necessary, for which Georges wanted a native whose judgment of character he felt he could trust.
It was only the language barrier, Jacob felt, that brought Luboš to the immodesty of declaring himself trustworthy and a good judge of character. He said it without boasting, with a trace of self-deprecation even, as if he were admitting that he wasn’t clever. He had none of the loud manner that Jacob had found in the few gay businessmen he had met in America—which Jacob hadn’t minded so much, because it had seemed to imply a permission to josh with them as if they were circus animals rather than wild ones. Instead he had a quiet competence, a kind of security in himself. He was like an adult explaining his work to a child. He seemed more fully grown up than anyone Jacob had ever met.
And yet for no apparent reason he had passed up a chance to learn French, and now, for the sake of a tumble, he was stepping out of the tram at the foot of Jacob’s street.
The neighbor’s collie did not bark at them; it was in for the night. As they walked, Jacob let the back of his hand brush the back of Luboš’s, and the touch of warmth felt electric in the cold air. When he unlocked the gate to the yard, he nodded to Luboš to precede him, as if he were a gallant and Luboš a damsel, and that was as much of a sign as it seemed safe to give.
—But it is pretty here, Luboš said, once they were safely inside.
For a moment Jacob saw the rooms as a stranger might. His eye picked out as incongruous the few items genuinely his, as if they were the litter he was responsible for at a campground deep in a forest. It aroused him, for some reason, to be reminded that he lived this way. If he decided one afternoon never to come back he wouldn’t lose much.
He opened the refrigerator, and they both took beers. They hadn’t even kissed yet. They were like teenagers alone for the first time after an arranged marriage.
—Here you write your novels? Luboš asked, pointing at the kitchen table and seating himself at it.
“In there, actually,” Jacob replied, in English, and pointed into the bedroom at a little round white table, which Luboš couldn’t see from where he was sitting. Jacob pulled the table to the couch for a desk whenever he made an attempt. “But I haven’t written anything since I got here.”
Luboš nodded. —Kuba…, he began.
“Yes?” Jacob answered.
—Nothing, Luboš said.
“I’ll light the candle,” Jacob offered, and proceeded to, instead of trying to translate the suggestion.
—It’s nice, Luboš said. —Kuba…
—Yes, Jacob answered, this time in Czech in case his talking in English had made Luboš diffident.
—No, nothing, Luboš said again.
—There is a problem? Jacob asked.
—Yes, Luboš said, looking away. —I have AIDS.
It took a few repetitions before Jacob was sure he had understood the word. He leaned over Luboš and embraced him—awkwardly, because Luboš didn’t rise from his chair—then kneeled at the floor beside him and asked, in tears, how it had happened and how long he had known. Luboš, who had hardened a little at Jacob’s tears, said the news was recent. He spoke with a slight smile.
It was strange and unlucky, Jacob thought. While the Iron Curtain had stood, it had kept the disease out of Eastern Europe almost entirely. There were still very few cases. Jacob wanted to punish himself for having thought that when he left America he would leave the disease behind, too, at least for a while, but he shouldn’t tell the story as if it were about himself. It was awful for Luboš. This was in the days before the new therapies; almost no one lived more than ten years after a diagnosis. The only chance to live even that long was to have the best doctors, the ones with connections to researchers, and there wouldn’t be any in Czechoslovakia. Luboš probably didn’t even realize that the marketplace sorted fates in the illness, that it apportioned survival by taking a kind of measure of a patient’s resourcefulness.
—And you don’t? Luboš asked. —It is common in America, isn’t it?
—No, I don’t. It’s not that common. Do your friends know? Jacob asked. —Your parents?
—No, no, Luboš answered. He waved a hand, as if to say that Jacob was making too much of a fuss.
—I’m sorry, Jacob said, apologizing for his state.
—Please, Luboš said. —But I thought everyone in America…
—I’m too young, Jacob explained. He held Luboš’s hand and cried for a little while. This was as dangerous a world as the one he had left, and somehow he hadn’t thought it would be. He accused himself, somewhat bitterly, of having come to Czechoslovakia to join in a victory lap he hadn’t earned, and told himself that Luboš’s Frenchman, who had no doubt given it to him, must have wanted something similar. —Your health now? Jacob asked.
—It’s good. He looked at Jacob with concern. —Kuba…
—Yes?
Luboš made an effort to find words in English. “I not know words. In Czech, kecám. I make joke.”
“I don’t understand,” Jacob said.
“Srandu. Fun. Not true.”
“A joke? You don’t have AIDS?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Was Luboš only pretending in order to calm him down? But Luboš repeated the disavowal and insisted that he had meant to play a joke and hadn’t expected Jacob to have such a strong reaction.
—Truly? Jacob asked.
—Truly.
He felt an absurdly powerful relief. —I am happy, he said, and embraced Luboš again, a little less clumsily now, because, he realized, he no longer thought him fragile.
“But I don’t want, tonight. Sleep only. You understand?”
Jacob nodded.
—You don’t make such jokes in America? Luboš asked, uncertainly.
—No, Jacob answered. It occurred to him that he was entitled to feel angry, but he felt only puzzled. He drank quietly from his beer and cast his thoughts back, as one does when one has been fooled, to see whether in his excitement he had revealed more than he would have liked to.
“I’m sort of a weeper, aren’t I,” he said out loud in English, more to himself than to Luboš.
—Pardon?
“And
you’re sort of an asshole.”
Luboš smiled. —You were very sad, he said. —It was good of you to be so sad.
Jacob saw that he had been expected to respond differently. When he and Luboš lay down for the night, they kissed quietly for a while, and in the end, because Jacob very much wanted to, they did make love, safely, as Jacob had learned to do in Boston, where the few men that he had gone to bed with had all followed the rules without prompting.
* * *
In the morning, he didn’t want to look at Luboš. In those days, he often felt shy with the other person after spending the night, whether it was with a man or a woman. It was a reaction he had no control over, like the kick of a gun. He stiffly offered to share his rohlíky, butter, and strawberry jam. He hated himself for his reserve, but he didn’t know how to soften it. He tried to disguise it by telling Luboš to feel free to take a shower, but then he spoiled the invitation by adding that he had to shower himself and had to be at the school in an hour, so Luboš did not accept.
—I am glad, that we met, Luboš said at the door.
At least Jacob thought that’s what he said; he wasn’t sure he understood the last word, but he didn’t ask about it, because he was looking forward to being alone. In the daylight Luboš’s face seemed older, uneven. Jacob didn’t understand why he had been drawn to it. He knew, however, that he would be drawn to it again when this mood wore off. He tried to keep that in mind. —I, too, he answered. There was something that his struggle with himself was distracting him from. There was a nuance he was missing. He tried to force his attention. He remembered that he had no way of contacting Luboš. —Telephone? he asked.
This time Luboš supplied a number. It belonged to a friend, he said, with whom they could leave messages. There seemed to be nothing else to say. They embraced quickly, for a leave-taking, and the smell of Luboš, rising off his body as they touched, first disgusted Jacob, then melted him, the second response succeeding the first almost instantly, disorientingly. This was the body he had been lying next to, the aroma reminded him, with whom he had taken a simple pleasure. He had somehow forgotten it upon waking up.
* * *
“I just had the most disturbing experience,” Annie said in a hushed voice, about a week later, as Jacob sat down at her table in a café in , or Old Town Square. It was midafternoon, and the square, which they had a good view of through the café’s windows, was nearly empty. It was too cold for tourists. Not long ago, a gold-colored statue of an East German car on legs had seemed to stride into the square, in the corner marked by the Staré horologe, but the statue had recently been taken down. What’s Your Hurry? had been the name of it. There no longer seemed to be any hurry at all, only gray bricks and a few wanderers, leaning into the wind as they walked.
Jacob looked around for clues.
“You’re welcome to the rest of my cake,” she said, misunderstanding his glances.
“No thanks. What happened?”
“Do you see your man there, by the bar?”
“My man?”
“Not literally yours, Jacob, at least not to my knowledge. The sharp one. Don’t look now. Youngish, dark hair, wool sweater, a bit naff. Don’t look I said.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sitting here, with my dort and my sodovku, writing a letter to my mother, quite innocent and respectable, and he comes over to my table. Uninvited, but quite nicely put together, I thought at first. I could tell he was an American. He asks for a cigarette and says he’s in Prague for a few days, what should he see? I don’t know, I tell him. The bridge, the castle.”
“Sounds innocuous.”
“But he becomes very inquisitive when he hears that I teach here. Asks how much am I paid. Is that polite in America? He starts naming figures, in dollars. I explain that my salary is set by Czech law and that it’s in crowns. And he points to my chocolate cake and says, ‘Can you afford that?’”
“Was he joking?”
“I don’t think so. I ask what he does for a living, and I believe the word he used was ‘I-banker.’ ‘Can you afford that?’ I say. And he gets quite hot under the collar. Tells me he came to Czechoslovakia to get away from that kind of ‘self-hatred,’ that was his word. He wanted to visit a place where they welcomed free enterprise and were grateful for it. I said, I work for the state and wouldn’t know anything about that. And he becomes quite threatening, with this booming voice—you’re too refined to boom, Jacob, but I find that Americans often have a talent for it—‘You will.’ And he stalks off like a little tin soldier.”
“He’s cute, though,” Jacob observed.
“He isn’t. He’s nondescript, really.”
“I think he knows we’re talking about him.”
“Does he? It’s of no concern to me.”
Jacob was out of things to read in English, and Annie had offered to show him a lending library that the British, during the Communist era, had set up in a corner of the Clementinum, a former Jesuit compound that now belonged to Charles University. To hide from the wind, they took a back route, down an alley that felt like a tunnel, past a Renaissance church with boarded-up windows, crumbling in on itself like an abandoned tenement in a slum, past a wine bar they all liked, and then, beside a store selling accordions and flutes, which seemed never to be open, through a passageway and into a further maze of alleys.
“I had a date on Thursday,” Jacob volunteered, when they were close to a wall and safe from the wind.
“Did you.”
This hardly signaled that she wanted to hear more, but Jacob wanted to try to put the experience into words. He told her about going to Café Slavia. She knew and liked the café, she said; she liked all cafés, really. He was less successful at conveying the tender awkwardness he had felt when alone with Luboš. Moreover, when he related Luboš’s joke, she looked alarmed.
“That’s peculiar,” she said.
He found that he wanted to defend Luboš. “I think the Czechs have a darker sense of humor.” Maybe the dictatorship they had been living under had accustomed them to playing with a larger part of the self as if it were false.
“It’s possible,” she said, mildly.
The British library was up a flight of stairs in the northeast corner of one of the Clementinum courtyards. Inside, it looked like a library that a New England prep school might have built for itself in the 1970s—comfortable chairs of artificial leather, a beech-wood card catalog, and, along the walls, like carefully trimmed rosebushes, a hedge of waist-high bookshelves, a branch of which jutted into the room every few yards, like the tongue of a capital E.
They browsed independently. Annie found a novel that her mother had recommended, by Elizabeth Bowen, and Jacob picked out a little blue Oxford World’s Classic of a Renaissance travel narrative, by an Englishman who claimed to have visited the land of Prester John on his way back from China.
“Because we’re at the edge of the world?” Annie asked in a whisper, as they compared their choices at a table in the back of the room.
“I guess.” In fact the library’s schoolroom look had made him feel guilty, and he had chosen the book in a spirit of self-improvement. Over the next two weeks, even though he would find little in it that interested him, beyond a few outlandishly fictional cannibals, he would dutifully read all the way to the end. He wasn’t, after all, writing anything.
“Have you fallen for this Luboš, then?” she asked, fussing with a corner of her book’s cellophane wrapper, which had come untucked.
“We just met.”
“You fancy him, in any case.” She didn’t raise her eyes to his. “I hope you’ll keep your wits about you.”
“I’m not a romantic. I’m gay, remember.”
“You are a romantic,” she answered, and then added, quickly, “I am, too; it’s all right.”
“I don’t think that the other thing is here yet. I think that’s why he thought he could joke about it.”
“But that doesn’t mean he’s on the l
evel.” She looked up and saw that she’d hurt his feelings for Luboš. “I haven’t even met him. Don’t listen to me.”
“There’s something very sweet about him.”
“Oh, well, ‘sweet.’ Perhaps you aren’t very far gone, then.” The fluorescent lights and the Formica tabletop between them seemed to put them in a context incongruously childish. “You should tell Melinda, you know,” she said abruptly. “It’s absurd of you not to. There’s nothing she likes better than a secret she’s justified in keeping from Rafe.”