by Caleb Crain
For once Luboš himself answered. —I want to talk with you, at least, Jacob said.
There was a pause. —Ota told me, that now you know.
—Yes, Jacob answered. In fact, until that moment, he hadn’t been sure about Luboš. The telephone made it possible for him to hide the fact of the revelation.
—A rendezvous at ? Luboš proposed.
—Yes, Jacob agreed.
Between their conversation and their appointment, the fog did not lift. Night, however, fell, and when Jacob emerged from the subway station, the fog was making halos around the lamps of Wenceslas Square, fine, white dandelions of light, and the bright stones of the pavement, closer to him than any of the buildings and therefore, in the cloudy air, less obscure, seemed to give by their reflection an upward glow, like footlights. Jacob knew before he could see his features that Luboš was the dark figure standing just past the bookshop, in front of a bank that never seemed to open. He was wearing a tan windbreaker; he was shivering and his hands were in the pockets of his jeans for warmth. Before he could take them out, Jacob kissed him.
—Tonight it can’t be seen, Jacob assured him.
—By good fortune, Luboš said, in reproach. He pretended to look around them for observers, but the gesture had an air of courtesy, of keeping up an old form. —To Slavia? Luboš suggested.
They walked past the sweetshop with glass walls, the balcony where Havel had declared the republic, and the gallery where the two of them had seen the exhibit of children’s book illustrations. Then they walked down as so often before. They walked past an antiques store where Jacob had once bought magic lantern slides of St. Vitus Cathedral and past the former offices of the Cuban cultural center, indefinitely shuttered. It had now been more than a year since the change, but everything was still in its old place. In a row there were a pharmacy, a stationer, an optician, and a travel agency, each labeled as such in the governmental lower case. A couple of months ago, on a street just parallel to this one, behind these smoke-gray Haussmann-like buildings, Jacob had been photographed for his residency permit in offices that had until very recently housed the secret police.
—A year later, and all is the same, Jacob said. —It is like a race where they fire the gun but no one moves.
—And yet we do move, as Galileo says, Luboš answered.
The National Theater came into view, amiable and glittering, like a woman with sloping shoulders and a bejewelled gown. Inside the building, Jacob had been told, the motto THE NATION TO ITSELF was inscribed in Czech on the proscenium arch. The theater was something the nation had given itself, in other words. It was a Victorian idea of independence. It was the idea behind choosing a playwright for president. Jacob couldn’t decide if it was modest or grandiose.
In the Slavia, their table this time faced the theater rather than the river, and Jacob let his eye wander up and down its columns, which were both decorative and terribly earnest, until he couldn’t see them any more for familiarity.
—What are you giving yourself? Luboš asked, to bring Jacob’s attention to the menu. His tone was almost businesslike, as if he were concerned to move their interaction forward, and Jacob wondered if it was a tone he used with clients.
—What is it? Luboš asked, when Jacob didn’t answer.
It shamed Jacob that Luboš was able to notice his momentary sulk. —I am deciding, he said, in half apology. Since Luboš had been willing to meet, Jacob ought to be able to spare him childishness. After all, Jacob had believed from the start that Luboš was sleeping with Collin, and he had known for just as long that Collin employed him, and if he had never put those two facts into any intimacy with each other before, why should it now make a difference that he could no longer think of them apart?
He looked through the menu for the name of a drink that he recognized. —I’m giving myself a soda water, he said.
He had mistaken how far Luboš was from him. But Luboš couldn’t have mistaken the distance. Jacob could imagine himself being seduced, being given money, and then deciding not to feel bad about it. Like the cab fare that Markus had given him in Berlin. But he couldn’t imagine setting out to be seduced for that purpose. Or maybe he could. But he couldn’t imagine going to bed with a person he wouldn’t also go to bed with for nothing. He didn’t care about money that way, he decided. But almost as soon as he consoled himself as to his principles, he wondered if he was underestimating Ota and Luboš, or overestimating himself: Perhaps it was only that he had never been made so to care for money.
Luboš ordered for both of them. He was all surface with the waiter, his face was a set of patterns, and he did not come back to himself after the waiter left. It was the manner that Daniel had had when he had shut Jacob out after their first night together, and that Markus had had when he had shut him out in Berlin.
“Do you know, what is a masáž,” Luboš asked.
—A brothel? Jacob answered. Literally it meant a massage, of course.
Luboš seemed for a moment to hate Jacob for having put it so bluntly. —In this case, yes.
The waiter returned, and shifted their drinks from his tray to their table. —The business is of this sort, Luboš continued. —Or rather, it used to be.
—No longer?
—The third partner is said to be in Africa. He is indicted. Do you know that word?
—It was in something that I read about the life of Havel.
—Thus, said Luboš. —And thus there will be nothing. He shrugged, as if he had been telling ordinary news. —And now you know.
—Yes.
A silence fell, and together they looked absentmindedly at the other customers of the café—the young Czechs from the art schools, who were wearing their scarves indoors and gesturing ironically; the tourists who had opened themselves from layers of sweaters and coats like flowers opening from calyces and were bent studiously over postcards; the lovers. Jacob was annoyed to discover that he had forgotten his cigarettes.
—Kuba…, Luboš began. He looked as if he were troubled by a duty of some kind.
—Yes?
—I did not know how to tell you, Kuba.
—It isn’t a bother, said Jacob.
—But it is a bother, he insisted.
—Well, so, you didn’t tell me, did you.
To Jacob’s surprise, Luboš could not meet his gaze and was watching his own fingers gathered around the small glass of liqueur that he had ordered for himself. —I didn’t even want to try with you. Even at the beginning. I tried to frighten you off. Do you remember?
Jacob recalled the embraces and the tears of their first night together. —I thought it was a joke, Jacob said.
—It was. I didn’t think, that you would be gentle with me.
—I was a fool, Jacob said. He did not want any more compliments on his ignorance.
—You don’t understand. I don’t mean that night, though I didn’t expect gentleness then, either. I mean, that I didn’t think, that you would be gentle with me now. I didn’t think you would understand me now.
—Now, Jacob echoed.
—But I found that I wanted you even so. And here he shrugged again, this time with a kind of despair. —Even if you judged me.
—I wouldn’t judge you, Jacob protested. —I was in love.
—But no longer, Luboš pointed out.
Jacob found that he couldn’t contradict this. He sensed that Luboš didn’t blame him. It was after all a country full of people who expected to become hateful as they learned to do things for money.
—‘In love’ is not said, Luboš continued, coolly. —We say zamilovaný.
Jacob repeated the word. Its structure suggested that love was a state that one could be put under or put into, like a spell. Like Merlin inside his rock.
The moment was receding. In teaching the word, Luboš had taken a step into abstraction.
—Stay with me, Jacob said. —It isn’t fair.
—Without the being in love, Kuba? It was for that that I wanted y
ou.
—If you left this business…
—You have a kind of freedom, Luboš said. He addressed Jacob as if one of them were onstage and the other in the audience. —We’re not yet rich that way.
He seemed to be praising Jacob for being able to escape him. He laid a couple of bills on the table between them, to cover the cost of his drink, and they said good-bye. Jacob tried to stay at the table for a little while alone, but the cheer of the café began to seem incongruous.
Vyšehrad
“Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult things!”
“Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?”
—Henry James
Jacob thought about going home. He still had some American change, which he kept in an empty matchbox in his sock drawer, and one night, after he had finished his pancakes and jam, he took the coins out, spread them on the kitchen table, and admired the burnt sienna patina of one of the pennies, which in the candlelight was iridescent with violet and green where people’s touch had salted it. The portrait of Lincoln was ugly and noble, and Jacob took off his glasses to look more closely. On the other side, an erratic line of shrubbery was engraved beside the Lincoln monument’s steps. The idealism seemed to be in Lincoln rather than in the coin’s design, which was homely. It was so homely, in fact, that there was a kind of democratic grandeur to it. It was the most beautiful currency in the world. Jacob was on the verge of tears.
It was money that would be the problem if he returned to America. Since childhood he had wanted to be a writer—to make art out of words—and he didn’t know how to make a living at it. The office job he had left had involved writing. The company had been housed in a brick building, originally a factory, partitioned into narrow corridors and large suites and fitted with teal carpeting and glass doors with chrome handles. The doors had been held shut by discreet magnetic devices in the floor and ceiling, silent in operation, which receptionists could release by pressing buttons under their white linoleum desks. Jacob had been seated in a room at the back of his company’s suite, beside a heavy-breathing photocopier that took up half the room and dried the air so thoroughly that it gave him nosebleeds. He had taken the job in the hope of striking a compromise between art and commerce. He hadn’t been asked to lie in the writing he did there, exactly. Is it corrupt to persuade people to buy what they don’t need? Sometimes Jacob had been able to tell that the people in question were poor. Once he went so far as to lock himself into the suite’s small, exposed-brick men’s room—one of the few rooms in the building that locked with an old-fashioned bolt—in order to talk himself out of quitting. It took an hour. The work came to feel like using the best part of himself falsely. At the time he told his friends that it felt like prostitution. He wouldn’t say that now, probably; still, he was not eager to go back to the job, or to any job like it.
It was easier to stay abroad. Jacob’s workload as a teacher was light, and in the hangover-Communist economy, it was no hardship to live on the salary. He didn’t want anything expensive, such as a car or a television, and even if he had wanted such a thing, there weren’t any in the stores. He would have liked a bicycle, but he could wait. The only thing he really missed was Western toothpaste—he had also missed Western soap until he had figured out that the children’s soap in Czechoslovakia was just as mild—but friends visited Berlin and Vienna often enough to keep him supplied. All he needed to accommodate himself to the idea of staying was a plan for escape. At his request, his parents had mailed him application forms for graduate school in America, and he now filled them out. For an essay, he made up something he didn’t quite believe concerning Melville, whom he did like. Once he sent the applications off, he was able to feel that he had in reserve a way of going back that would put off his dilemma. Armed with that feeling, he was free to stay indefinitely.
Money, then, was accounted for, but it would have been hard to say what, if anything, he meant to do about romance. The possibility of sex was still so new in his life that it seemed plausible he could simply set it aside—not hide his nature from himself but refrain from doing anything about it, much as he was planning to refrain, for as long as he remained abroad, from any serious professional ambition. According to one way that he found of looking at it, he had tried to tell a story about himself and a lover, and it hadn’t ended well, but rather than feel it as a story with an unhappy ending, he preferred to think he had made an error in the telling. He had gone about it the wrong way. He had been naïve, and from now on he would be sophisticated. He wasn’t ever again going to make the mistake of confusing a person with an idea. Ideas were ideas, and people were just people. He now understood that he was in a relationship with Prague, and if he had been hurt, it was Prague that had hurt him. The funny thing was that the hurting made him want to stay. It was a kind of attention that Prague had paid to him. He had to prove he could stand up to it—that he could make a success of whatever materials came into his hands. He was used to thinking of success as taking the form of knowledge, and through Luboš he had been given a difficult piece of knowledge, and the difficulty suggested value, though Jacob wasn’t sure the value would hold up anywhere else in the world. The fear that it might not was another reason to stay, actually. It was as if he held a large sum in a currency that could only be exchanged at a steep discount. Moreover, he couldn’t bear the idea that anything connected to his being gay might cause him to lose his nerve—might cut short his experience. His friends here were straight, and none of them were leaving.
When he returned to work at the language school, he kept to himself for a week or so. His friends seemed to think he was still recuperating, and he let them think so. Many of them were making plans to go home for the holidays.
In mid-December, a mild weekend came, and he looked on his city map to see if there was any green within walking distance of his apartment. He thought he saw the symbols of a park and a pond to the south. He found a brake of pines and birches there; a foot path led in from the road. The day was warm enough for him to unbutton his coat. It was the first melt of the season, and leaves that had frozen green were now relaxing into their deaths, and where the sun had burned off the snow it was beginning to fade the grass beneath. He came out into a meadow beside a car-repair garage. Flimsy-sided trucks were parked in it, and on folding tables there were wire cages of hens and rabbits in dozens of varieties. It was a fair. The people were from the country, and the animals were for sale. There was the dusty smell of straw and the sharp smell of chicken dung. Dachshund puppies in a nest of newspapers let Jacob stroke them, rather equanimically for puppies, and at the foot of the meadow he found a man selling what seemed to be guinea pigs and hamsters. Jacob didn’t recognize the words on the cage labels. Though he had his camera, he felt too timid to take pictures; he wanted to be present and natural more than he wanted documentation. He pointed, and the man put a tiny sparrow-colored hamster into his cupped hands.
—How big will it be? asked Jacob.
The man measured about two inches of air between his thumb and forefinger. It cost only twenty crowns. Jacob returned the animal for a moment, shook the cigarettes out of a pack he was carrying, dropping them loose into a coat pocket, and then coaxed the hamster into the empty box. The box fit into his shirt pocket, and next to his chest it was likely to stay warm.
—I have a new friend, he told after knocking at her door. —He’s rather small, he continued, taking the cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.
The dogs were curious. —Bardo! Aja! reprimanded. —These dogs. She pulled the door close and leaned only her head out. Jacob flipped open the box top and she peered in. —Oh, he’s so itty bitty, she said excitedly.
—How do you say…? Jacob asked.
“,” instructed. —It isn’t a mouse, is it.
—No, not a mouse.
“Tak, ,” she repeated. —Boy or girl?
—I don’t know, Jacob answered. —But his name is Václav. You d
on’t know, by chance, where I can purchase a house for him?
—But I have one, answered. —I will lend it to you.
An hour later, Václav was living in a small glass cage, which Jacob furnished with a couple of empty plastic film canisters and shredded pages of the American political weekly that Daniel sometimes wrote for. Jacob set down water in a shallow porcelain salt dish, which the Stehlíks had left in the apartment but which he was too American ever to use for salt. Václav began to gnaw on a section of carrot as long as he was, cramming full first one cheek and then the other, and Jacob sat by, watching his progress contentedly, one hand resting in the cage so the creature would begin to find his smell familiar.
* * *
Jacob squinted through a window at the dashboard. “It’s a Ford,” said Melinda, after leaning over to open the passenger’s-side door, which was where Jacob expected the driver’s-side door to be. “Your countrymen’s handiwork.” She picked up workbooks, her purse, a roll of toilet paper, and some candy wrappers from the seat beside her and dumped them in back. The car lurched slightly as she did, her foot having slipped off the clutch. “Oh Jesus. Sorry about that.”
“Do I get in here, on the wrong side?”
“The ‘wrong’ side may be putting it rather strongly, don’t you think?” She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around the steering wheel and gave herself a sort of underbite as if she were holding in a wish to tease him further. “I know it isn’t as chic as a Trabant, but at least it isn’t a bloody Škoda.”
“Are they bad? I’ve never been in one.”
“Oh, not so bad, I suppose. But Rafe says the automobile part of the business is inextricable from the tractor part, and we mustn’t invest.”
“I’ll tell my broker.”
“Let’s see, the motor is still running, I believe. No it isn’t, is it.” She restarted the car.