by Caleb Crain
“It should be.” He held on to his anger long enough to end the phone call. The stubborn little motherfucker, he thought.
—My friend died, he told the Stehlíks, in their kitchen. The dogs padded over to where he stood and sniffed him. —Herself to herself.
—Self-murder, supplied the word. —Jesus Mary.
—She was your girlfriend? Mr. Stehlík asked.
—She was, several years ago. It was a little more than the truth, and much more than he had meant to say.
—It is a great pity, said, with none of her usual tentativeness. —It is a mess. It always is, in such a case.
Mrs. Stehlíková wrung her hands, classically. —If you will want to smoke a cigarette, it doesn’t matter when, you will come to see me.
—Yes, if you will want anything…, Mr. Stehlík offered.
Jacob thanked them.
—To sit with us, Mrs. Stehlíková continued. —Or if you will want to borrow one of the dogs for company.
—Yes, take Aja, but not Bardo, elaborated. —Bardo is tiresome. The boxer and poodle looked up intelligently at the sound of their names. —Yes, you, told the poodle.
—Oh, he’s not so tiresome, Jacob said. —I have to teach today, he added, and they excused him.
It was a relief to fall into the routine of teaching. He walked his students through dialogues about having a watch fixed and having a ticket refunded. He found himself thinking not of Meredith but of Luboš, with an urgency that surprised him. They had a date for Saturday night, but Jacob wanted to see him sooner. No one answered, though, when he called Luboš’s number from the faculty lounge between classes.
The only other person in the lounge was Kaspar, who poured a thermos of soup into a bowl, and as he took a spoonful of it, slurped a little. “Forgive me,” he said, with his quiet smile.
“Of course. Is it good?”
“Very. My landlady cooked it. Would you like to try?”
“No, no. Thanks, though.”
“In Czech, it is called . Do you know it?”
“Borsht. I didn’t know the Czechs made it.”
“They do not make it. It is Jewish soup.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. Don’t get it on your clothes. It doesn’t come out.”
“Are you Jewish, Jacob?”
“No.”
“I thought, because of your name. Do not take offense.”
“I wouldn’t take offense at that.”
“That is good. Some people do.”
The trees outside the lounge window were bare for winter, and past their forked trunks the sky was chalky gray like cigarette ash, and so bright that it was a little painful to look into.
“Are you Jewish, Kaspar?” Jacob asked, to make conversation.
“I am not, but I think I am sorry for that. It interests me very much.”
“Do you talk to your landlady about it?”
“I do. She is a very kind woman.”
“I think it’s going to rain,” Jacob said, inconsequently. Then, more inconsequently: “I heard this morning that a friend of mine committed suicide.”
“Suicide? I am very sorry, Jacob,” Kaspar answered.
“Please don’t stop eating,” Jacob said. In just a quarter of an hour they both had to teach again.
“Was he unhappy?”
“She. She was unhappy when I knew her. But I thought maybe she was getting happier.”
“Sometimes it is a mercy.”
“No it isn’t,” Jacob said sharply.
“Are you a Catholic?”
“I’m not anything. But it’s just death. It isn’t a mercy.”
“Perhaps I have the wrong word.”
“No, you had the right word,” Jacob answered, unwilling to hear anything less than an explicit retraction.
“You feel very strongly for her.”
“I guess.”
“You were in love?”
“We had a lot in common.”
“Ah, she was a writer.”
Jacob didn’t answer.
“That will be hard for you,” Kaspar added, thoughtfully.
“We were both pessimists,” Jacob tried to explain.
“Pessimists?”
“We both thought it was going to be hard.”
“But I thought that you did not believe in the difficulty of writing. You told me so that evening at Melinda’s party.”
“We didn’t think writing was going to be hard.”
“No? Do you think they want you to make art?”
“Who’s they?” Jacob asked, sickening at the realization that the topic was drifting from Meredith to himself. “They don’t care one way or the other. They aren’t why it’s hard.”
There was an awkward silence. “In any case there are many reasons why it’s hard,” Kaspar said, blinking heavily in distress at having crossed someone in pain. “I should not have argued with you. Please forgive me.”
“No, it’s all right. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
“I wish that you would forgive me anyway.”
“Of course I do. Of course I do.”
Kaspar resumed his soup. It looked like blood, though of course neither of them felt like saying so aloud.
By the time Jacob had finished teaching, later that afternoon, the gray of the sky had darkened further and there was a quick, erratic wind. , the district that contained the language school, stood on a hill, and at the foot of it, in the dusty square where Jacob customarily changed trams, he saw that people were passing in and out of a subway station that had been under construction since before his arrival in the city. If the station had been open that morning, Jacob hadn’t noticed it; he didn’t think it had been. had told him when he moved in that the authorities planned to extend the northeast arm of the subway four stations closer to her family’s home. She had also told him not to expect it to be ready during his stay, because the government had all but shut down its merely municipal functions. But the station appeared to be open now; it seemed to be the first day of service.
Jacob decided to take it into town. He didn’t expect to find his friends. He didn’t know where they were going to be that night—probably at home in bed early, recovering from the night before. But there was no one at his apartment. Perhaps he could buy flowers of some sort for Meredith. He could throw them into the river for her. She would have made a face of scorn at that: “Oh,” she would have said, with brittle disgust.
The station had a décor like the older ones it joined—stone polished to the point of reflection, panels of yellow-tinted metal. No placards had yet been hung to warn of fines or to point directions, but Jacob had a November stamp in his transport pass, and he knew he would be able to tell which was the downtown track. He estimated, as he walked past the glass booth that housed the station supervisors and downstairs to the platform, that the subway extension would cut a quarter of an hour from his trip to Wenceslas Square. Moscow was said to have paid for the old stations. It meant something for these to open despite the revolution.
An old woman in a blue apron hurried out of the supervisors’ booth in pursuit of him. She was yelling. On the landing halfway down to the trains, she caught him by the wrist and yanked as if she were going to drag him by force back upstairs.
—I don’t understand, Jacob said. —The station isn’t open? he asked. He could see that it was. People in ordinary clothes with no special demeanor were standing on the platform below.
—The other side, the other side, the woman yelled.
He looked around but didn’t see any barrier that he had crossed. —I’m sorry, he said. —I don’t understand. With his free hand he gently tried to peel back her grip, which was upsetting to him.
She clenched harder and yanked his arm again, startling him. —No! No! You must up! She was addressing him with the familiar second-person pronoun. It was her privilege as a woman with white hair to treat anyone as a child.
—Up? Jacob repeated. —The station isn
’t open?
—Yes, but you must down by the other side. Come, up!
The banister bisecting the staircase, he realized, was meant to separate upward from downward foot traffic. He had been walking down the up staircase, as yet unlabeled.
—I didn’t know, Jacob apologized. —There are no signs.
—That doesn’t matter. Come!
—I’m almost down already. When I return, I’ll remember. On the next trip. When I return, you’ll have a sign.
—No! No! You may not go this way! Now she was pulling on his arm with a two-handed grip. —Up! Up!
—I won’t! Let go!
—You must! You must do it normally!
—Leave me! Jacob said, shaking his arm as roughly as she was shaking it, a little frenzied by her touch.
—You Russians, the woman said.
—I’m not Russian, Jacob answered, pulling off her hands with his by force, one at a time, and walking down the rest of the stairs to a train that was just coasting up to the platform.
The train carried him smoothly into the dark. He felt the looks of his fellow passengers settle on his sneakers, as they always did on the subway, where the seats faced one another across the aisle. He closed his eyes. He wanted things. He refused to stop wanting them. Maybe he even wanted to write a story about Meredith.
He ate a pizza in the stand-up restaurant at the foot of Wenceslas Square where he and Luboš had eaten the day of Bush’s speech. He stood at the counter in the front of the restaurant, which looked through plate glass into the street, and while his back was turned to the view, it began to snow. An unexplained calm in several faces prompted him to look over his shoulder and discover it. It was the first snow he had seen in Prague. He paid quickly and stepped out into the square.
From the stately shoulders of the National Museum, and from the sword raised by the saint before it, the long square swept down. The flakes continued at millions of separated points the suppressed gray light of the sky, and by attracting the eye to middle distances that an ordinary view collapsed, they gave the square a depth that Jacob had not appreciated before. They sped down toward the paving bricks and into them, like ghosts into walls, along curves that were neatly interrupted by the flakes’ vanishing. He thought it was unfair to Meredith that he had the luck to stare up into the beauty of the square and enjoy his sorrow for her.
He turned away. He remembered a flower shop in , the Little Square. The narrow, crooked street that ran to it was nearly empty of tourists, but for a more perfect solitude he took advantage of a recent discovery and opened a person-size door cut into the carriage-size door of an apartment building, and stepped into a private passage, which wound through the interior of the block in loose parallel to the public street outside. Afraid to call attention to himself, he didn’t click on the passage lights. He could see well enough by the twilight that sifted down from the first-landing windows of the irregularly placed staircases that lined the passage. He heard only his own footfalls. When, at the end of the corridor, he emerged, he found that the snow was falling more heavily. He hadn’t worn his winter coat or brought a hat, and his hair was soon matted with it.
—Do you have roses?
—But it is winter, see? You see what we have.
There was nothing better than red-dyed carnations, so he took them. He considered the First of May Bridge, the one near Café Slavia, which cut across island, because it would be more or less solitary, but then he decided that with such ugly flowers he couldn’t choose anything less than the most beautiful bridge, the Charles, even if it was so beautiful as to be a cliché.
On the bridge itself, standing in what was now sleet, he was miserably cold and wet, and it was difficult to compose himself and find the feeling that he had meant to put into the gesture. It helped to face the river, so he leaned over the thick stone ledge and looked upstream toward the long shining weir, which cut the water into planes. Beneath him, where the river flowed quietly around the piers of the bridge, the water was black, and when he dropped his first flower, it felt more like an experiment than a tribute. The carnation turned gray as it fell, and after it hit the water, it dipped and rose once or twice on the surface like a person turning on a bed to get comfortable, before the current carried it under the bridge, out of sight. As he dropped the rest, singly, he had an incongruous memory, which he could not shut out. It was a story that an older gay man, a professor of French literature, had told him in a taxi in the spring. Though sick, the professor had agreed to come with Jacob’s friends from a dinner party to a bar. In the taxi he had changed his mind about his strength and decided to go home, but not before telling Jacob—who had confided his hopeless crush on…he couldn’t remember now for sure, but it must have been on Carl—a story from the 1970s, of asking a straight friend to undress and lie on the floor, while he, the professor, not then a professor, sat above him on a chair and dropped twelve dozen roses onto his chest, one by one. “This is how beautiful you are to me, that’s what I was telling him,” the professor recalled. “At first he laughed and thought I was ridiculous, but I didn’t say anything, and after the hundredth rose or so, I could see that he saw that I meant it, and then I could see that he was hard, and I kept dropping the roses.”
Jacob flattened and folded up the wrapping paper that had carried the flowers. He wished they had been roses.
* * *
Returned to his apartment, Jacob changed into a dry T-shirt and underwear, and ate some bread and jam. He left the cushions he used for bedding on the couch, because he thought he would be warmer there than on the floor. But he woke up cold nonetheless after what seemed only a few minutes of dozing. He carefully doubled his red blanket so that it would be twice as thick but still cover all of him and tried again. Instead of drifting back over the events of the day, however, his mind fell into a rut, like a heavy lawnmower yanking after it the child who is supposed to be pushing it. First he had to sound out all the letters in the Czech word for “bookstore,” which is a long one, over and over. The task gradually changed into a nonsensical conversation in English about buying a bus ticket, and this too he seemed to rehearse, as if he were preparing in his mind to teach it as a lesson at the language school. He could only stop himself from repeating it by making an effort to come awake. When he did, he recognized in the repetitions the stamp of fever.
As an experiment, he swallowed. The back of his throat pained him. He waited for a while in the almost-dark, hoping the symptoms would subside. The heavy curtains no more than dimmed the light from the street lamps outside, and under the covers he felt a certain security in the room. Those were his books on the shelf, after all. On the floor the lime carpeting was bland and familiar. There was the wardrobe where he hung his shirts. There was the small, circular, white-painted table he used as a desk. He felt that the room was on his side and that it was safe to wait here. He closed his eyes. But the fever continued to force his mind to run through drills.
In the medicine cabinet, he found a thermometer left behind by grandparents, wider and easier to read than the kind he had grown up with. The back of it was a solid forest green. It reminded him of a pen he had owned as a child, a souvenir from a French town, given to him as a gift, which had had a window where a skiff sailed from one side of a bay to another as you turned it upside down and then right side up again. On his way back to the couch, he fetched from the wardrobe his down sleeping bag, which he hadn’t used since buying the red blanket. Under this layer and the others he took his temperature. It was in Celsius, which he couldn’t interpret, but he didn’t think it looked high and so fell once more into an uneasy doze, the glass wand resting in his hand.
Upon waking this time, he draped the red blanket around him and went to sit at the kitchen table. While retaking his temperature, he put water on to boil for tea and wrote nonsense in one of his notebooks with colored pencils. The words looked grand in their variety. I’m going mad, he thought in a spirit of adventure. To translate the measurement, he wrote ben
eath the words, in orange, the equation 212 32 = 100 0, and then by longhand arithmetic found that he was slightly more than 103 degrees Fahrenheit, a number that scared him.
—Good evening, what is it? asked civilly after his knocking woke her.
—It is not well with me. He handed her the thermometer to read.
—That is high enough, she agreed.
She brought him into the living room and went to tell her parents. Through their half-open bedroom door, he heard their unguarded murmurs together. In a minute, they filed in quietly in their robes—like a king and queen in Shakespeare, Jacob thought.
—I am sorry—, Jacob began.
—Psh, Mrs. Stehlíková stopped him. —Does it hurt?
—In the throat, he answered.
Mrs. Stehlíková said something, but too rapidly for him to understand. He had the sense of play-acting that one has when calling attention to an illness that hasn’t taken away the ability to walk or think.
translated: “Mother say, that when she has pain in throat, she smokes a cigarette. But she is joking, of course.”
After conferring with her father, tried several telephone numbers without success. Then she proposed something; Mr. Stehlík answered with subdued exasperation. Her next call got through. Unable to follow what was happening, but feeling cared for, Jacob sank a little into his fever.
“How are you?” asked in English, when the call was over.
“So-so.”
Father and daughter repeated the expression, which seemed to amuse them. “That is, between?” Mr. Stehlík asked.
“A little less than between,” Jacob clarified.
“There is hospital here,” said, pointing on a map to a clinic just beyond their post office, “but is closed. I call friend, who is doctor; he is not at home. But there is doctor at night hospital, and I speak to him. He say you must come. But is here.” She pointed to a boxed red cross halfway to the language school. She waited for Jacob to understand the implication.
The Stehlíks did not own a car. “Taxi?” he asked.
“Taxis are asleep. By night tram. But I will go with you.” She gave him a moment for the idea to sink in, and then repeated, “By night tram!” in a commiserating exclamation.