by Caleb Crain
* * *
In the new year, Carl arrived. airport was on the other side of the city from Jacob’s apartment, at the end of a long and tedious journey by tram, subway, and bus. Though Jacob himself had arrived in the country by train, he had been to the airport once before, to pick up a package of books and clothes that his mother had sent by freight mail. On that trip, he had waited in line for his package in a basement office, where half a dozen women had sat talking and eating their lunches amid ringing telephones. From time to time, one of the women silenced the phone at her desk by sightlessly lifting the receiver an inch from its cradle and then replacing it. After a while someone asked Jacob what he wanted and then told him that his package was probably in an adjacent garage where packages were sorted into heaps according to day of arrival.
This journey promised to be more pleasant. Melinda had offered to play chauffeur, for one thing. And unlike the international freight office, the passenger terminal was a part of the country’s public face, and as a matter of national pride, it was likely to be efficient and maybe even relatively cheerful.
They were able to park by the curb just outside the terminal, a low, glass-fronted box from the 1960s. The city’s name stood in widely spaced metal letters atop the overhanging roof. Arrivals were at the far end of the building, and they walked the hundred yards or so of its length inside, to spare themselves the winter wind.
“Is he tall?”
“No.”
“Short?”
“No. My height.”
“Any distinguishing features?”
“He had little round glasses the last time I saw him.”
“So he looks just like you. Does he wear plaid shirts in vivid colors, as well?”
“I thought you liked my shirts.”
“I adore them. Nezlob se, .”
“What does that mean, exactly?” It was something Luboš used to say.
“‘Don’t be angry.’”
“I thought there might be more to it.”
“It’s quite useful. You say it instead of apologizing. Is he a looker?”
“A looker,” Jacob echoed.
“I thought there was a chance he might be, given, you know.”
“We’re just friends.”
“Annie did tell me. I mean because you were taken with him at first. Annie did tell me that as well?”
“He has the kind of face you take an interest in.”
“Even more dangerous.”
“Why are you asking?”
“Oh, I don’t know. So as to be able to help, should you have trouble spotting him in these massive crowds,” she said lightly. Beside them at the rope barrier, only a few other people stood waiting.
Between the rope and the translucent white doors that hid customs ran a long expanse of tiled floor. Half an hour after Carl’s flight landed, people began to file down it. Most were young and carried backpacks.
“There he is,” Jacob told Melinda. “In the dark blue pea coat.”
Carl recognized Jacob and flashed a hello with an open palm. He was walking toward them slowly, weighed down by a red polyester backpack that projected a foot above his head. His mouth had set with the effort of travel, but it began to soften as he approached. His eyes took on the self-consciousness of someone who is delaying a greeting. Jacob found himself aware that he and Melinda probably had the same look of anticipation, which could be mistaken for guardedness. Carl would see Jacob thinner than he remembered him, because of Jacob’s illness, and he would see, standing beside him, a beautiful young Englishwoman whose white scarf called out the faintly purple blood that colored her lips.
In fact, when Jacob turned to check, he saw that Melinda had unwound the scarf. The hollow at the base of her neck where her collarbones met was pale and delicate. She caught his eye on her and without comment returned her gaze to Carl.
“How are you, man?” Carl said, almost singing the words, as he always did when he spoke.
They embraced. “I’m so glad you’re here,” said Jacob. He introduced Melinda.
She gave Carl her hand, and as he took it, the two of them both smiled at her formality. Because Jacob knew both of them well, without their knowing each other, the reserve between them seemed like an illusion to him. He had the sense that he was watching friends perform a play.
“Pleasure,” said Melinda.
“Likewise,” he answered.
“Melinda’s giving us a ride in her car,” Jacob explained.
“Awesome. I’m ready to go.”
The wind, cold and astringent, seemed to have swept the sky clear. They squinted against the sun and against dust kicked up from a narrow traffic island in front of the terminal, where an orange soil had been laid down but not seeded, and they hugged their coats to themselves instead of fastening them.
“How was your flight?” Jacob asked, once Melinda had started the engine.
“The best part was the end. You exit the plane on one of those little staircases. It’s like you’re Nixon in China. You’re the president.”
“Did you kiss the ground?” Melinda asked, studying him in her rearview mirror.
“I don’t know if Czechoslovakia and I know each other that well yet.”
“I suppose it’s the pope as does that, isn’t it.”
“He’s Polish, right?” Carl asked.
“Mmm,” said Melinda.
“Hey, don’t make fun of me yet. I just got here.” He laughed at himself and leaned back in his seat. “I’m in the unreal stage,” he narrated. “This is Prague. I can’t believe I’m in Prague.”
“The little mother with claws,” Jacob said.
“What’s that?”
“That’s what Kafka called it.”
“Nice,” said Carl. The road took them past close-nestled suburban houses in gray and white stucco, the sort the Czechs call villas. A few residents had put up signs in German advertising rooms for rent. “Is this it?” Carl asked. “Is this the little mother herself?”
“I don’t know a more scenic route, sorry,” Melinda said. “Unless Jacob can find one in the map. Which is in the pocket in the door, I believe,” she prompted.
“No, no, please,” Carl said. “I just didn’t know if we were in the city proper. Thank you for the ride, by the way. It’s most excellent.”
“There are a number of us who will do anything for Mr. Putnam, you will find.”
“What if I want to take it personally?” Carl asked.
“I’m sorry?” Melinda replied.
“What if I want to think you’re doing it for me?”
She didn’t meet his eyes in the mirror. “It was for you, more or less, that I cleaned my car, seeing as how you are a stranger to me,” she said, after a pause. “Jacob can tell you how it looks ordinarily.”
“Where are we?” Jacob asked.
“On that map we’re on Leninova, but the names have changed around here.”
“Oh, I see.”
“It used to be that from the airport you took Leninova all the way to the Square of the October Revolution, and then turned right onto the Slovak National Uprising. Which had a certain ring to it.”
“Is this the October Revolution up ahead?”
“Yes. And now it’s called Victory Square. See? I suppose it was a victory for someone. I believe the Slovak National Uprising has now become a saint of some kind. That’s the new dispensation.”
“It seems to me you should still be able to turn right on a Slovak national uprising,” Jacob hazarded.
“Not in Prague, darling. Perhaps in Bratislava.”
They took a steep curve that doubled back on itself as it descended and then they began to follow the river.
“Where’s the castle?” Carl asked. “I thought there was supposed to be a castle.”
“We were heading toward it, but it’s behind us now,” Jacob explained. “On the left here, at the top of this hill, is where Stalin’s monument used to be.”
“Is that something the
y just knocked down?”
“No. It wasn’t finished until after Stalin died, and they knocked it down half a dozen years later. But everyone still remembers it.”
“The memory is a sort of national scar,” Melinda elaborated. “The architect is said to have hanged himself, I believe. There’s to be a party there tomorrow night, by the way, according to Henry. A happening of some kind.”
The steep front of the hill, which had been the statue’s giant pedestal, seemed to be frowning across the river. Their car turned away from it at the entrance, where it could be scaled by terraces and stairways, and they were soon embraced by the solid stone palaces of the Old Town.
“Maybe I should tell you now,” said Jacob. “I’m not out here, the same way.” He felt Carl and Melinda exchange glances.
“I, for example, know,” Melinda volunteered, “but it is one of the secrets I keep from my boyfriend.”
“Aha,” said Carl.
“You really haven’t told him?” Jacob asked.
“You asked me not to.”
“I know, but I didn’t know you would actually do it.”
“We take such matters very seriously, as you see,” Melinda continued, addressing Carl.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“It’s transitional,” Jacob added, in his own defense. “How is everyone in Boston?”
“They’re all right. Don’t let me forget, I brought you a program from Meredith’s thing.”
“How’s Louis?”
“His father hospitalized him finally. Against his will.”
“God.”
“Yeah. But he was pretty crazy. There’s a whole story. I had to pretend I was going to meet him. I was the bait. I’ll tell you about it some time.” The context raised by Jacob’s questions and Carl’s answers was too weak to hold them. The threads of it fell on the two of them but then slipped off. The buildings began to absorb Carl’s attention. “This is a really beautiful city, isn’t it.”
“It is.”
“I mean, people say that it is, and you hear about it, but it’s so…”
“Yes?” Melinda asked.
“I don’t know. Monumental.”
She apologized: “In fact we’ve skirted the impressive area.”
“It makes it hard to leave,” Jacob warned. “It attaches you.”
“I can see how that would happen.”
“The claws, as it were.”
* * *
The Stehlíks had furnished Carl’s room with a real bed, large enough for a couple. It was nicer than Jacob’s provision for sleeping, which still involved the nightly disassembly of his sofa, and ta apologized but did not explain. Jacob suspected that the largesse was unintentional—that Mr. Stehlík didn’t want to give Carl a grown-up’s bed any more than he had wanted to give Jacob one, but that it was easier to let Carl sleep in it than to find somewhere else for it to go. The suspicion seemed corroborated by the continued presence in Carl’s room of the two locked wardrobes, which apologized for almost as soon as she met Carl. “I cannot move,” she told him, shaking with silent laughter at her inability.
“No problem,” Carl assured her. “This is great,” he added, surveying the room with appreciation.
“But yes, it is problem, but you are kind.”
“She’s a sweetheart,” Carl said, once he and Jacob were left alone.
Jacob agreed. parents were not on hand, because Mr. Stehlík’s employer had moved him to a post in Warsaw just before Christmas, and he and his wife had driven there a few days earlier, for the first in an indefinite series of long stays. The circumstance had complicated the negotiations for the extra room; Jacob sensed that Mr. Stehlík would have liked to be able to look his new tenant over before admitting him. But Jacob sensed, too, that Mr. Stehlík knew that a large house was safer when it had people in it. “Mr. Jacob, you will be responsible,” he had required of Jacob in yielding.
While Jacob cooked lentil soup and Irish soda bread, his own favorite of the few meals he knew how to prepare, and one of the most elaborate, he and Carl talked. By walking through Jacob’s rooms with his American eyes, Carl desanctified them. He broke their strangeness and their quiet, but Jacob felt content to lose his hours of solitude when he heard Carl tease him for having let melted candlewax ruin the folkloric integrity of the tablecloth, admire the cement wall out their bedroom windows, and confess, as he paused in the kitchen after a shower, wrapped in a towel, that the whoosh of the gas water heater in the bathroom had terrified him. “Are there any numbers, do you know, for the annual deaths in Czechoslovakia from fires caused by water heaters? That thing is dangerous, man.”
“I kind of enjoy it. It wakes me up in the morning.”
“You have short hair already.”
During the exchange, Jacob kept his eyes on the soup. He wanted Carl to feel that he could trust him. But Carl must have noticed the effort; the intimacy was never repeated.
They ate dinner with the hamster’s cage in the center of the table.
“He won’t think he’s going to be an hors d’oeuvre?”
“He was my company until you came. I don’t want to displace him right away.”
“Of course not.” Carl’s hair was still wet from his shower. “Is he eating because we’re eating?”
“I put that carrot in there just now.”
“Oh, I thought maybe it was sympathy eating. But it’s opportunity eating. This is really good by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re so set up here. You’ve got Václav. You’ve got a pantry. You’ve got a fucking pantry, man.”
“I love my pantry.”
“As you should.”
“Our pantry, now.”
“That’s big of you.”
“I’ve developed Depression-era habits,” Jacob boasted. “I always buy at least one extra bag of rice. At least one extra bag of sugar. There are shortages. You’ll see.”
“What are the boxes?”
“Dumpling powder.”
“Dumpling powder. Excellent.”
* * *
In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education. In Rome someone like Jacob wasn’t likely to distinguish sharply between the education he received in sculpture and the pleasure he took in the nudes depicted—in the beauty of the slaves and prostitutes who had modeled for the sculptors centuries before. So in Prague, Jacob wasn’t sure whether he valued the city’s buildings for their forms or merely as an opportunity for a kind of aestheticized history. The buildings interested him mostly as shadows cast by the way the Czechs had seen the world, or had wanted to see it, at different moments.
Their first morning together, Jacob took Carl to the foot of Wenceslas Square. They started at shoe store, with the spare, rectilinear modernism of the First Republic. At Havelská, Jacob pointed out the shadowy arcade at the foot of the building where Mel and Rafe lived, so that Carl could admire the graceful curves of its Gothic arches. Fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He hoped that Carl could appreciate the simple things and not just the eye-catchers. He didn’t think Carl would mock his way of looking at buildings, which was part of his project of trying to come close to the revolution; Carl’s irony was too gentle. But he worried that Carl’s companionship might distract him from it, and so he was on the lookout for signs in Carl of a fellow seeker.
It was Jacob, however, who first strayed from art to commerce that morning. “This is new,” he said. “This building was shut before.”
“What is it, crystal?” Carl replied. “That’s a thing, isn’t it, Bohemian crystal. The sort of thing my mom would know about.”
“Do you mind if we go in?”
Jacob had visited several state-run crystal shops in the past. They had been cluttered with vases and goblets that were for the most part identical except in size and occasionally color. This shop, in contrast, was set up like a Western boutique. A ginger-tinted bowl, in the shape o
f a turban that had been doffed intact, had been given a shelf of its own in a window. Translucent pink and green sand dollars lay in a display box widely spaced apart, as if in a museum. The sand dollars were probably ashtrays; Jacob remembered that he hated expensive ashtrays on principle; then he also remembered that he ordinarily had no interest in crystal.
“This is one of the new stores.” He was speaking to Carl, but he was trying to explain his interest to himself. “Private retail only became legal a few weeks ago.”
Carl nodded politely. “Isn’t Mozart’s opera house around here?”
“Oh, sorry. You didn’t come to see this, did you.”
“I came to see everything.”
“I don’t remember an opera house,” Jacob said once they were outside again.
“‘The site of the world premiere of Don Giovanni,’” Carl quoted from a guidebook he had brought with him.
Across a narrow, cobblestoned pass stood a closed church. Jacob knew from habit and a general sense of direction that their next turn should be to the left, but Carl walked right, following a map in his guidebook. He was heading toward an alley with empty storefronts—into a kind of nothingness that one found throughout Prague, that one stumbled on in corners; Jacob had learned to avoid it. He had trained himself not even to see it, for the most part. The alley led back to , where they had just been.
“There’s nothing here,” Jacob said. He shivered. He put up the hood of his coat, which blinkered his sight like a horse’s, and focused on Carl. “It isn’t here,” he repeated.
“I think it has to be. Is that it?”
Carl pointed at a hoarding that Jacob must have stopped noticing some time ago. It was unlabeled, except to forbid entry.
“You’re not allowed to go over there.”
“Well, I can go up to it, can’t I?”
“People don’t.”
The cobbled pass was so narrow and the hoarding so tall that from a distance they couldn’t see more than a slice of white building behind the plywood, and close up, the angles made it impossible to see anything but the hoarding itself. Its brown paint had puckered where water had got underneath, and a wire fence had been built in front of and against it, as if to hold it up.