by Caleb Crain
After midnight, night trams ran less than once an hour. “No, I’ll just go to sleep. I’ll be better tomorrow.”
“You may not. Temperature is too high. Doctor say, that you must to him. He is nervous.”
“Ježišmarja,” Jacob permitted himself. The women laughed.
—At least he is speaking Czech well, Mr. Stehlík observed, in that language.
“I go to dress,” Jacob said, falling into what he thought of as a Czech pattern of English.
—The next tram will come at two forty, said, consulting the laminated schedule they kept by the phone. —I will come for you at two twenty-five.
—Thus, agreed Jacob.
In his rooms he dressed properly, pocketed his passport and long-term residence permit, and laid on the couch to wait out the interval.
—It is unbelievable, he complained to , ungratefully, when she came to fetch him.
—It is unbelievable, she agreed with a shrug. —And nevertheless…
They had to walk to the head of the street to cross the highway, because of the concrete wall that shielded the neighborhood from it. The night tram’s line ran through a field on the far side, a large empty field adjacent to a factory that built engines and industrial machinery. It was lit by street lamps, which looked out of place because there was no street. There were only the tram tracks and high dead grasses, and here and there curving wet furrows where the wheels of a backhoe or a truck had bitten through the raw soil. At the bottom of a gully a dozen unused concrete sewer pipes were stacked in a shoddy pyramid. To power the tram, a web of electrical wires curved through the air, below the lamps but high above the ground.
Until the tram came, Jacob didn’t say anything. He was angry at his bad luck, and he was making a show of his frailty and his need to conserve his strength.
—I’m going to die, he said when they were safely aboard. They were the only passengers. In Czech his sentence consisted of a single word, compact and strange. He repeated it for the pleasure of the sound. —I’m going to die…on a night tram.
—It is a special fate, for an American, observed.
He groaned, because he really did feel miserable.
—But don’t speak that way. Truly you aren’t going to die.
—Truly?
—It isn’t possible. On a tram? It is nonsense.
She closed a window for him. She was right. The tram was even more simple and solid than his bedroom, and its progress suggested that nothing aboard it could be final. The wires sang as the tram rounded the corner at the top of the field. It edged past a checkerboard of motley vegetable patches, now dry and silver.
—But I am going to die, he insisted. —We’re all going to.
—But not on a night tram, answered with a touch of impatience.
By the time they reached the hospital, Jacob was too exhausted and feverish to see continuously, and he found later that he had no clear memory of how they got into it from the tram. But he was able to remember the emergency room, paneled in dark wood like the tailor’s department at a men’s clothing store, each of its curtained chambers like a changing room. In the center was a great table, as in the kitchen of an old hotel. Jacob sat on the table, while a sullen doctor in a white coat attended him. The doctor seemed displeased that he had been woken; directed by a nod from , Jacob saw in the nearest chamber the rumpled sheets and pillow where the doctor had been lying. He spoke brusquely to and not at all to Jacob.
“Angína,” the doctor diagnosed.
—I don’t understand, Jacob said. —But will remember the word.
—You need antibiotics. Do you understand that?
Jacob nodded. The doctor said a little more to and then left them alone. signaled for Jacob to put on his coat again; they were going home.
—Antibiotics? Jacob asked.
They knocked at the pharmacy attached to the hospital for a quarter of an hour, but no one answered. Jacob wondered, as they waited, whether the doctor’s rudeness had covered embarrassment.
When they reached home again, empty-handed, gave him her family’s supply of Paralen, which she said was like aspirin, and he agreed to leave his door unlocked, so she and her mother could check on him in the morning without waking him. She told him that according to her dictionary the English word for what he had was “quinsy.”
* * *
The antibiotics, which fetched from a local pharmacy the next morning, seemed weak; they moderated the illness but did not defeat it. Jacob, however, found it easy to accommodate himself. In the mornings he was cool and lucid, for the most part, though he became dizzy if he stood up quickly. When he could, he took advantage of his morning strength by making a soup or a soda bread—something large and simple, which would keep. Then, as a treat, he lay on the couch and read Stendhal. Somehow he was always able to resume the story of Fabrice without confusion, though he could not call it to mind until he picked the book up. It was as if the French language were a separate room from the one he inhabited when he spoke Czech or English, and the story of Fabrice were going on in that room only. To be present in the room without reserve he needed a silence like the one his illness afforded. He had never had one like it in America.
At some point in the afternoon a small task would find him impatient, and then another would fluster him, and for a remedy he would run a hot bath. After stepping into it, he would carefully dry his fingers and read Stendhal there for half an hour more, prolonging the day’s span of clarity by means of the water and the novel. It usually held until dinner, during which he would begin to feel disoriented. At night he sweated himself to sleep, the fever breaking at some unconscious hour early in the next day.
He wondered once or twice if it was conversion sickness, but he didn’t torment himself with the idea, because he had never done anything not allowed, not even with Luboš, and because the illness felt too familiar. He was fairly sure that the Czech quinsy translated as the American strep throat, in his case, anyway. He had suffered from strep so often as a child that he recognized it as an old companion.
The illness made an interlude, not unlike his first weeks of solitude in the apartment. When he telephoned the school, the head of the English department, a clever and matronly woman, assured him generously that he would not be expected at work for at least two weeks, then grew alarmed and cautious when he admitted that the doctor hadn’t issued a certificate of illness during his middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room, and finally generous once more upon hearing that would take him to the neighborhood clinic first thing Monday for the proper documentation, called a neschopenka. “It is a crime to stay home without one,” the head of the department sighed into the phone. “It is the old system, still. We have not got trust here. And there is a control, a special police, who visit to see that you are at home as you say. You must ask to go to the shops for you, in case they should come.”
did shop for him, though no police officer ever visited. The first errand he set , however, was a telephone call to Luboš’s number, saying that he was too ill to keep their Saturday date. As soon as he sent her off, he regretted it, because he realized that in his condition he could probably have won a limited permission to use the phone socially himself, and he was afraid Luboš might perceive an attempt to establish distance in his deputizing of the call.
He had a great deal of time to think about Luboš during his enforced holiday, so much time and so little shaped by physical effort that his thoughts took on an abstract and idealist cast. He was growing proud of the relationship, he felt, and he wondered if the pride was false or naïve. By its nature a relationship was not an accomplishment. It was just a connection that happened to exist, for as long as it did exist. To a confidant, if there had been one, he might have excused the pride by referring to the communication that Luboš and he were establishing between cultures. What really pleased him was less grand and more peculiar. It was that he had felt no wish to back away after his reunion with Luboš, perhaps because of Luboš’s belie
f in his innocence, or whatever quality it was that they were agreeing to call by that name, which had nothing to do with sexual fidelity or appetite. He felt sure that Luboš had the quality, too.
It was an end to shame, he thought with exaltation. (He was sipping tea and sitting in the kitchen’s morning sun, as he thought this. The illness, during its abatements, seemed to make him more susceptible to such accesses.) It was odd that, directed by Daniel’s scorn, he had spent so much time trying not to be taken as an innocent. It was hard to know what the quality in question meant to Luboš, exactly. It might be no more than an echo of Christianity or of Communism. The innocent belonged to the communion, in both cases. They were happy in it; they had no wishes apart from it; their hungers were satisfied. No, that wasn’t right, Jacob corrected himself. It was not the innocent but the believers, or maybe just the saved.…
He listed in his journal things he wished he knew about Meredith. Where she was buried. Whether she had been worried about money. Whether her parents had ever spoken to her again. Once, when was unpacking with care the eggs, onions, lentils, carrots, and milk that she had bought for him, and laying the items gently on the kitchen table for his approval, he remembered almost unwillingly the violent way Meredith had used to take her Peters edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier out of her satchel, as if she scorned to have any concern for the book as a thing, and the similar violence—or rather, a precision so dry it sounded like violence—with which she played from it, throwing down the notes dismissively as if none of them deserved to be part of the piece of music they together suggested, as if the time spent playing them were a waste she couldn’t keep herself from.
—I also had a friend who committed self-murder, offered, seeming to read his thoughts.
—I’m sorry, Jacob answered.
—It was very sad! said, nodding and smiling as if the emotion caused by such an event were a joke the two of them shared.
—Did she say why? In a note?
—No. Did your friend?
—I think, that no, said Jacob.
thoughtfully twisted her mesh bag into a ball. —My friend was a dissident. The parents did not want me to see her, because of it. But I saw her.
—Were you a dissident?
—Me? She pointed to herself and widened her eyes, as if he had suggested that she knew how to repair a car engine. —No, no. She was much smarter than I. But she was my friend, and I saw her. But she wouldn’t get out of bed. It was very hard. She was an orphan—do you know that word?
—Yes. It seems that your friend was depressed.
—Yes, and now it is we who are depressed, we who were not dissidents. Is ‘fair’!
The word férový is formed by adding to the English word fair the standard Czech suffix for adjectives, and ’s use of it seemed to Jacob to make a humorous reference to the changing standards of judgment.
* * *
On Wednesday morning Luboš visited as a surprise. He was brought to Jacob’s door by . “Your friend is here,” she said, in the formal tone of voice she used in the presence of others, “but I tell him, that you are ill.”
—I am only here to see you with my own eyes, Luboš quickly reassured Jacob in Czech. —It is for you to say whether I stay for a few moments. Are you well enough?
—You will stay all day, if you have it free, Jacob insisted. For a moment he feared that the enthusiasm of his welcome would betray him to , but she seemed to see in it no more than a conventional exaggeration, a signal to her that for the moment he didn’t need her protection.
After withdrew, Luboš and Jacob at first remained stiff with each other, as if unsure of their privacy. Or perhaps Luboš still felt unsure of his welcome. To Jacob the mere presence of Luboš, by violating the apartment’s quietness and isolation, meant sexual possibility. It was a good morning, Jacob thought to himself; he was strong enough. He wanted to seat Luboš in the sun that was flooding the kitchen and kiss him slowly.
The sun reminded him that he had no photographs of Luboš. —Can I take your picture? he asked.
—Oh, Kuba.
—So that I will remember you when I’m back in America.
—It’s a kind of cruelty, then, and not so much a flattery.
—A flattery, too. I wouldn’t want to remember if you weren’t so beautiful.
He stood Luboš in the kitchen, with its white kitchen walls and table, so that the illumination would be general. He was aware that he wanted a picture of Luboš in order to show it off in a future he couldn’t yet imagine, and he thought confusedly that it was better to take the photograph now, before they had sex, if that was in fact what they were about to do, in case the gun kicked again and the attraction he wanted to capture was compromised. But he didn’t think the gun would kick; his lust felt heavy with momentum.
Through the viewfinder of his Minolta, he saw that the staging of the photograph was setting Luboš even further into himself—the diplomat advancing, the animal retreating.
—But do not seem that way, Jacob said. —Be here with me.
There was a flash of near anger in Luboš’s features, the best state of their rough beauty, and Jacob photographed it. He took another as the interruption subsided.
—Is there a problem? Jacob asked.
—There is nothing.
—I want to embrace you.
—Well, then.
After a while, Luboš interrupted. —Your neighbors, Kuba, he said, meaning the open window rather than anyone in particular.
Jacob didn’t think the window was the problem. —It is one to me if you are with anyone else.
—Don’t be so worldly, Luboš replied. —It’s not what I like about you.
—I want, for it to be free between us. It’s only for happiness between us.
—Happiness is so serious, in your conversation.
—I’m American, Jacob shrugged.
Luboš lifted the Minolta from around Jacob’s neck. —And now I a picture of you, which only you will see.
—What do you mean? You’ll be able to see it in two weeks. There’s a shop in Národní.
Luboš smoothed the cowlick on Jacob’s forehead. —Perhaps in two weeks, then. Say sýr. I imagine, that no one else takes your picture.
—It doesn’t occur to anyone else.
—Thus let it remain.
They made out a little more, but then Jacob felt dizzy and had to lie down. Luboš brought him a glass of water and sat on the floor beside him.
—How is your business? Jacob asked.
—Collin says, that we are too slow.
—There are others in the same business?
—There will be many.
—And what is it, the business? Luboš would forgive Jacob’s inability to remember.
—A kind of trade.
—Import and export, Jacob said, and he rolled over grumpily.
—You do not like Collin, Luboš observed.
—No.
—I too do not.
—Why not? Jacob asked, still facing away, studying the coarse threads of the fabric covering the sofa cushions.
—Do you know, what a neschopenka is?
—Yes, Jacob answered, turning back because he was curious. —I had to get one.
—The other partner, the third partner as you call him, is a doctor. He gives neschopenky for money. Do you understand? The police are looking for him.
—I understand.
—It’s difficult to explain.
—But I understand. It’s not so difficult.
—They’re not good people, Kuba, he said, as if he were still not sure whether he had put it simply enough.
—Let them drop.
Luboš shrugged. —It’s a question of possibilities. A kind of sullenness came over his features as he said this, and then the old smile covered it.
For Jacob, watching, it was as if he finally discerned the music that a noise had been interfering with—as if the music overcame the noise just long enough for him to pick out t
he tune. —You’re afraid, that I will leave, he said. —It isn’t that you don’t care for me.
—Oh, you aren’t leaving soon.
—And so you can’t break with them, he persisted.
Luboš paused before replying. —They and I, we know each other a longer time, he said, more quietly.
It was a new kind of check to Jacob; it was like a problem in economics. However shabby Collin was as a person, he had given himself; he had gone so far as to risk incrimination. Jacob, in comparison, had offered no more than a provisional promise to stay in the country. Luboš had been able to see the limitation before he could. It was perhaps the freedom to put off meaning it that had attracted Luboš to Jacob. Luboš had probably never ventured before into caring for a person who played with so little at stake.
—But if I stayed…, Jacob began. —America isn’t necessary for me. I only want to be a writer.
—In fact you don’t understand, Luboš said.
But Jacob thought he did. He thought that they were both sorry about what was dividing them, and that they could be together in their sorrow over it, at least. They lay down on the basis of the somewhat willful misunderstanding.
* * *
Jacob was summoned one morning to the Stehlíks’ telephone. “Were you planning to teach the lesson on the subjunctive to your advanced students?” Melinda asked. “As your substitute I need to know.”
“Does English have a subjunctive?” Jacob replied.
“Well, if you don’t know, darling, I don’t see how you can expect any of us to. The BBC or whoever it is that manufactures these delightful workbooks seems to be under the impression that there is such a thing, but the language is really in your countrymen’s custody at this stage, I feel, so shall we say it’s a skip?”
“Why are you asking me this, Melinda? You know I never plan more than ten minutes before class starts.”
“I’m trying to outfox your landlord. The one who keeps the flaming sword beside the telephone. Am I overdoing it?”
“He’s not paying any attention.”
“Oh, sorry. How embarrassing. How are you, then, dear?”