by Caleb Crain
“Still a bit weak-minded in the afternoons and evenings. But it only hurts when I swallow. The side effect is I don’t have any desire to smoke, which is lucky, because I can’t leave the house to buy cigarettes.”
“Shall we arrange a shipment?”
“Prague smokes for me, is my current feeling.”
“It does that, doesn’t it.”
“Luboš visited yesterday,” Jacob volunteered.
“Luboš?…Oh, Luboš! Well done. Under their very noses. You are improving.”
“It wasn’t acrobatic or anything.”
“But I’m so pleased to hear that it can be when you’re in the pink.”
“Oh dear.”
“Darling, I’m just taking the tiniest fraction of the piss out of you.”
“I’m so misunderstood.”
“And an invalid, too. I’m calling in fact to say how sorry I am that Rafe and I won’t be there today.”
“Here? Why? I mean, I’d love to have you.”
“Oh, you don’t know yet, do you. And that’s because I was supposed to verify that you are agreeable. That you were agreeable? That may be the subjunctive, come to trouble us. Please say that you are agreeable. For Thanksgiving.”
“How did you know it was Thanksgiving?”
“You forget that Rafe is an American. When he told Annie, she had the idea of going over to cook you a Thanksgiving dinner, while you lie in your sickbed.”
“With a turkey?”
“Well, no, a chicken. I don’t believe there are turkeys in Prague.”
“They have them in the basement of Kotva, the department store in Republiky. I asked.”
“Do they? Annie will be crushed. She thinks she’s tapped every resource.”
“I won’t tell her.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t. It’s meant to be something of a coup de théâtre. They descend with a trussed fowl and sundry victuals. You know—something out of Dickens.”
“Who else is coming?”
“Thom, Kaspar, perhaps Henry. Rafe has to go to the institute. There are so many Americans there now they decided to have something. And so I have to go, too, as the ostensible girlfriend. I’d much rather pay you a visit, I assure you. And I will do, very soon.”
* * *
“You must tell us to go, if at any point we seem to be tiring you,” Annie said by way of preface. “We’ve brought a whole feast, you see,” she explained, bobbing, almost dancing with pleasure in her achievement. Dislodged by the long trip, her blond hair was straying away from her face in all directions like a lion’s. “You wouldn’t have thought it of me, would you, that I could manage such a thing. It isn’t a turkey, mind, but we can ‘stuff’ it for you, if you like. You see I’m very well informed about your ‘Thanksgiving.’”
“Very,” Jacob agreed.
“It sounds disgusting, in my opinion, ‘stuffing,’” she continued. “I’d never heard of it before Rafe told me. To put your fingers inside a raw bird. It’s the sort of thing they did on the frontier, isn’t it. To extend the meat.”
“No one’s ever done that sort of thing in Ireland?” Thom put in.
“I suppose they might have done,” she granted. “Meat pasties and such. I’m prepared to stuff, is what I mean to say.” From her bag she unpacked dry bread, sausage, carrots, apples, and at last a plastic-wrapped chicken.
“And I brought beer,” Henry said, as he stocked the refrigerator with bottles, “which I don’t suppose you’ll be well enough to drink, come to think of it.”
“You’ll drink them.”
“But it’s Thom who has the pièce de résistance,” Henry added.
From his backpack Thom took a burlap bag. “Brambory,” he announced.
“Where did you get them?” Jacob marveled.
“They’re just potatoes.” Annie objected. “I don’t think a potato ought to upstage a chicken.”
“It’s a fine chicken you’ve brought, Annie,” Thom reassured her.
“But potatoes,” Kaspar almost whispered. “You can’t buy them anywhere.”
“I bought them from one of my students,” Thom explained. “Little wanker asked to be paid in pounds—pounds or Tuzex, he said. Had to ask him what a Tuzex was.”
Jacob didn’t know either. “It’s a kind of artificial currency,” Henry explained, “for buying luxury goods in special shops. It was a way of distributing regime perks, really.”
“Whiskey and perfume and fur coats and such like,” Thom clarified.
“It doesn’t make sense any more,” Henry continued, “or it won’t in a few months, when Klaus finishes liberalizing the crown. But there used to be limits on how much Tuzex and Western currency a person could buy in a year, and people hoarded them.”
Jacob nodded. No doubt that was Collin’s ambition—to run the equivalent of a Tuzex shop in post-Communist Czechoslovakia.
“I told Thom I know a recipe for gratin,” Henry said. “I couldn’t find Gruyère. But I did find a cheese, and I have a bag of milk, in case you’re short.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Jacob said, accepting the bag from Henry. “It all sounds so lovely.” The milk lapped and quivered inside its plastic. “There are more chairs in the bedroom. I’m sorry I forgot to bring them in here.”
“You’re to rest while we work,” Annie ordered.
Jacob sat at the kitchen table and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he found Kaspar seated across from him. “I have brought only poems,” Kaspar said. “A small book that I am translating.”
“From Czech?”
“From Czech into German. The fellow was a journalist in the First Republic, and in Paris he fell in love with the surrealists. You will look at it later. I shall put it on the bookshelf in your bedroom for you now.”
The international gay guide was not there but safely hidden in a drawer under T-shirts. “Thank you. I don’t know if my Czech is good enough.”
Kaspar merely smiled. Jacob closed his eyes again. He listened blindly to Henry offering and uncapping beers, Annie clattering through pots and pans for a roasting tray, and Thom washing off his pocket knife so he could peel potatoes with it.
“Are you all right there?” Thom asked. “Shall Annie make you some tea?”
“Shall I?” She opened a cabinet. “Is this your usual?”
“The yellow one,” Jacob specified. “You have to light the burner with matches.”
“I had better turn it off until I find them then, hadn’t I, or we’ll all be gassed. But you’re meant to just sit there,” she insisted, stopping him as he moved to rise.
“Here.” Henry supplied a light. “Kaspar told us what happened to your friend. I was very sorry to hear it.”
“It’s kind of awful but I’m fine,” Jacob said as blandly as possible.
“It’s a rotten thing to do,” said Annie. “It’s a disappointment, when someone does that.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Jacob replied.
“Well, I don’t know the circumstances.”
“Not that it keeps you from commenting,” Thom said.
“I’m not hurting Jacob’s feelings. Am I, Jacob? You must say, if you’d rather not talk about it.”
“I don’t mind.”
“It’s supposed to be better to talk about such things,” Annie said in her own defense.
“But it’s so ugly,” Jacob said.
His friends paused, in case he was going to say more. The kettle began to whistle, and Annie poured it.
“Are you angry?” she suggested. “That would be quite natural.”
“It doesn’t seem fair to talk about it. It’s not as if she can answer back.” Because he hadn’t put that aspect of Meredith’s silence into words before, he was suddenly aware he might cry.
“I imagine that part is natural, too,” Henry observed, in a tentative tone.
“It’s nice that you’re all here.” His emotion embarrassed himself and them, and there was another pause
. It was as if they were a family, communicating by silences as well as speech. It was Thanksgiving, after all, Jacob thought, though the holiday couldn’t resonate for the others as it did for him.
“Does this look right?” Annie asked after she had washed and dried the chicken, and set it in the roasting pan.
“It looks as if it favored the left side, in life,” said Henry. “As if it might have had a limp.”
“Oh, it does, doesn’t it,” Annie agreed. “Like a tennis player, with one arm bigger than the other.”
“All the chickens are perfect in America,” Henry said.
“Are they?” She gave Jacob a worried glance.
“They’re given antibiotics,” Henry explained.
“But you don’t mind, do you, Jacob?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Let me see.”
“Is it the left side?” Annie asked. “Oh, I see. I was imagining it upside down.”
“I’m fairly sure the head of the bird went here, when it had one,” Henry suggested.
Now that his attention was called to it, Jacob saw that the bird’s right leg was slender, from what looked like a disease rather than an injury. It was a little sad to think of the animal alive. “They don’t seem to have decent antibiotics for humans here,” he said, “so I don’t suppose they can manage them for chickens.”
“Have you ever given thought to vegetarianism?” Kaspar asked.
“Not now, Kaspar,” Annie warned.
“It’s only a question. I’m not a vegetarian myself.”
“Perhaps I’ll pop outside for a fag while you lot confer about the lifestyle of the bird here,” said Thom.
“I’m going to lie down for a while myself,” Jacob announced. “Is that all right?”
“Of course,” Annie said. “It’s your apartment.”
* * *
He woke to the sound of his friends murmuring in the next room. He heard the oven yawn creakily as someone checked on the roasting chicken. “But I don’t understand that,” he heard Annie’s voice say, rising above the others to protest something. Through the part in the curtains of his bedroom window, he saw a knotty mantle of clouds, darker than the gray of the cement highway barrier, bringing a premature dusk. All day he had wondered if it would rain—he had developed a shut-in’s fascination with the weather. He tensed his legs under the covers to stretch them, and then let them lie loose and indolent. It was a luxury to think of his friends assembled in the next room.
“Good morning!” Thom greeted Jacob when he at last returned to the kitchen.
“I felt like Prince Myshkin in there,” Jacob said, “lying faint and grateful on my sofa while society swirls about.”
“Were we too loud for you?” Annie asked.
“No, not at all.”
“You do not have consumption?” Kaspar asked.
“Did Myshkin have that? Or was it his friend? Anyway, no.” Jacob found the question irritating. Kaspar seemed to miss the petting he got when he was in Mel and Rafe’s keeping, and in their absence put himself forward the way a nervous child does, by hunting for an error to atone for or a tragedy to regret. “They told me I have quinsy,” Jacob continued, “another nineteenth-century disease.”
“That’s what you have, isn’t it, Kaspar,” Annie said.
“Quinsy?” Jacob asked.
“No, the other,” Annie clarified, “but that isn’t the proper name for it.”
Jacob now wished he hadn’t joked.
“It’s rather a personal matter…,” Thom cautioned.
“It is no secret,” Kaspar said, with a gesture of his hand brushing Thom’s scruples away, like crumbs from the tablecloth. “The head of the German department, too, has TB, and we were talking about it just last week.”
“Dr. ? I didn’t know,” said Annie.
“He was encouraging me to be stronger. He does not like it that I am so often away from work.”
“Hardly fair of him,” Thom noted.
“And I will tell you something, but you must promise not to say it to others. I said my case was in the bones of my legs. And then he showed me. But you must promise to tell no one.”
“We promise.”
“He removed it,” Kaspar said, tapping his own nose.
“Removed his nose?” Annie asked.
“I don’t understand,” Jacob said.
“His case was in his nose.”
“Isn’t it real, then?” Thom said.
“It was to encourage me!” Kaspar repeated. For him the department head’s motive was the best part of the story.
“You oughtn’t to have told us that,” Annie said sternly.
“You aren’t telling the truth, are you?” asked Jacob, who thought that at least one of them would have noticed the prosthesis, if there had been one. “Right there in the teacher’s lounge, he took off his nose?”
“He is an old Communist,” Kaspar explained. “No one else is competent to run the department. But he can no longer threaten, and the school does not yet have money to lure. How to get us to obey? That is his problem.”
“He could appeal to your good nature,” said Annie. When Annie and Jacob had come back from Berlin, the headmistress had scolded her for arranging a substitute on her own rather than through the office.
“But he does not know how. He tries by—,” he gestured instead of saying it again.
“So it’s once again the problem of socialism with a human face, as it were,” said Henry.
“But when there is no longer socialism, and the face is wounded. And when, as Jacob says, the antibiotics are rather mediocre.”
“So you do think capitalism will be an improvement, after all,” said Jacob.
“Oh no. Under capitalism no one will take any trouble to persuade another, only to buy him.”
“You miss socialism, then?” Henry asked.
“I missed socialism even when we had it.”
“But it was socialism that caused the damage,” Jacob said. “The poor antibiotics and so on.”
“But the idea of socialism didn’t,” Kaspar answered, humorously, so as to suggest that the quixotism of his defense wasn’t lost on him. “The powerful will find a new kind of force. The one you are accustomed to, probably. But for the moment there is this clumsiness. It is an interlude.”
“It must be awful, not to have a nose,” Annie said.
“It would be a pity if there were nothing about the coming changes you approved of,” Henry commented, “when you worked so hard against the last government.”
“But I did not work against the government,” he protested, with the innocence that Jacob imagined he put on when asking Melinda for tea while in her bathtub.
“You worked as a dissident.”
“But that is not the same, except perhaps to your friend Hans. I worked to continue certain possibilities, and it happened that the government did not like them.”
“No, Hans wouldn’t understand that distinction,” Henry said.
“I think that Havel is a good man. He is in earnest. It is only that my place has changed. I am through the looking glass.”
The room had grown dark while they were talking, and when Annie lit the candle on the kitchen table, the flame created a scene different from the one it created when Jacob was alone—a scene of conversation.
While the roast stood and the gratin cooled, Thom dropped into boiling water two long white cylinders of Czech dumpling, which he had mixed earlier from a box. After a few minutes, he fished the cylinders out and cut slices by garroting each cylinder several times with thread.
“So that’s how it’s done,” Jacob commented.
“Jana taught me,” Thom said, with a certain pride.
“It is clever,” said Annie. The exposed, perfectly white flesh of the slices steamed lightly. Thom set two on each plate while Henry carved the chicken. There was barely room for the friends around Jacob’s small kitchen table; Henry had to eat with his plate on his lap and his beer on the floor.
They were gathered in a corner of the apartment as they were gathered in a corner of the city, as if to make of their shared mood a haven, and the emptiness outside their circle seemed like a protection. What if they were to stay here together forever, Jacob wondered, apart from their families and their pasts, improvising the rest of their lives? He had told Luboš that he couldn’t stay, but he had spoken then as if the decision were someone else’s, as if his presence weren’t his own property. He could choose to give it away if he wanted to. If he continued to want to so badly…
“I completely forgot to tell you,” said Annie, “that Thom and I checked out one of the school’s tape players, for you, in case you were wanting to hear some music. We teachers can take them home, you know.”
“Oh, I’ve already got one checked out.”
She looked crestfallen.
“But did you bring any tapes?”
“Thom did. And I thought I was so clever. When you told me about that fellow loaning you a tape, I ought to have known you would have a way to play it.”
“What tape might that be?” Thom asked.
“Depeche Mode,” Jacob answered. “It wasn’t my choice.”
“I was going to propose an exchange but in that case I think I’ll offer a simple loan,” he said, handing Jacob a cassette he had been keeping in his shirt pocket. “I think you said you liked this band.”
“I liked their last album. I don’t know this one.”
“A friend just sent it from Edinburgh.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d like them,” Jacob said, opening the cassette to read the insert. “They’re even faggier than Depeche Mode.”
Annie gave him an admonishing look.
“That may be, but they’re proper socialists,” Thom replied, and winked at Kaspar.
“Oh, all that God and Marx stuff,” Jacob said, remembering the lyrics.
“That is something that is worse, I hear,” Kaspar said.
“What?” asked Annie.
“The life of gays.”
It took Jacob a moment to realize that it was his own description of the band on Thom’s cassette tape that had introduced the topic.
“I have friends,” Kaspar continued, with a vague gesture that implied he was not free to be precise about their identity, “and they tell me that many of the young men now—.” He hesitated. “Perhaps it is not delicate.”