by Caleb Crain
“He has all luck,” repeated slowly. He grinned at his slowness. “There we met him. Mr. President Havel invite us. At press meeting, you know, where come the newspapers and speaks the president.”
“It isn’t usual, that they invite a university paper,” interposed.
“It’s called a press conference.”
“A press conference,” repeated. mouthed the syllables without voicing them. Marek merely looked thoughtful, as if respect were keeping him from trying to emulate English and modesty were keeping him from upstaging .
“But they invite us only one,” admitted.
“To one. They only invited us to one.”
“Tell me,” ordered , “of what political party is Rafe?”
“I don’t know. Should we get started with a lesson?”
“Often we have conversation only,” replied. “Is he of the left or the right?”
Jacob was afraid that free conversation would be little use to , who didn’t seem to know the basic patterns of English, or to Marek, who didn’t seem to speak at all, but he didn’t want to offend them by pointing out their disadvantages, and was studying him impatiently, in expectation of an answer.
“I imagine he’s a Democrat. Most intellectuals are, in America.” Daniel wasn’t, and he would have hated Jacob’s simplification.
“The Democrats are of the left, that yes? But why, if you are free not to be? I do not understand. The Republicans are the party of freedom, that yes? And the Democrats are like our Socialists.”
“It isn’t that simple,” Jacob protested.
“How is it?” asked. “I do not know.”
Rafe had answered these questions, too, Jacob sensed. , and perhaps the silent Marek, who was tapping the tin band at the end of his pencil against his teeth, were testing Rafe’s responses against Jacob’s, and vice versa.
“Democrats are not so left,” suggested.
“No, that’s true.” Appreciating support, Jacob failed to correct his grammar.
“You are innocent, in America,” accused. “You do not know, how the Communists are. Do you know, who Senator Joseph McCarthy was? Your government was full of Communist spies.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But yes! They are killers. The KGB was in the CIA. You do not even know.”
“Perhaps I don’t know,” Jacob conceded.
“Do you know what is, StB?”
“‘Do you know what the StB is.’ The secret police in Czechoslovakia.”
“Our KGB. Would you like to see a contract? Marku, please to show Mr. Jacob the contract. We will publish next week. Can you read Czech?”
“A little.”
“It is a form. You sign, when you say that you will give information to the StB. And then you are theirs. They show it, if you make trouble.”
The formal, legal Czech was beyond Jacob, but he could admire the letterhead, where the insignia of State Security was crisply printed, and the length of the numbered list of conditions of cooperation. “Where’d you get it?”
None of the boys seemed to hear the question.
“They are dirt, and they make people dirt,” continued. He read the contract through for Jacob, translating as he went. “The CIA must be as strong, or you will lose.”
“But we’ve won,” Jacob replied.
“But is not certain,” Marek replied, speaking for the first time, “that they lose. We do not have the papers of StB.” He tapped the contract with his pencil stub. “We have only this, and one or two other, as for amusement.”
The lesson ended awkwardly. The editors left it to Jacob to bring up the matter of payment and expressed surprise when he expected money for what they felt was no more than a mutual introduction.
* * *
The two friends were lying in their beds, reading. Carl had not yet got up to shut the door of his room for the night, and Jacob could hear him subsiding into sleep—could hear his breathing become more regular. A knock; .
“Are you awake?” she asked in English, apologetically. “There is war.”
“War?”
“Is Carl?” She meant: Is Carl here? “Father invites, that you watch the television. Upstairs.”
They padded up behind her in their socks. It would be Kuwait, Jacob realized. The British newsmagazine he liked to read had recently declared Saddam Hussein of Iraq to be another Hitler. The magazine’s editorials had compared Kuwait’s plight to Czechoslovakia’s in 1938, when it was betrayed by France and Britain. On the stairs, even before he knew for sure that it was indeed a war to defend Kuwait, he felt proud of his country for taking a stand. He wanted to explain the moral case to Carl, to hear it worked out in his own voice, but he was too excited to speak.
The Stehlíks were dressed for bed. Mr. Stehlík pointed heavily to the television set; Mrs. Stehlíková patted the sofa beside her, to let them know they were welcome to sit down for a few minutes.
“Your America is at war,” Mr. Stehlík said, emphasizing the preposition, which he had just learned from the anchorpeople. In those days, one of the American cable news channels was broadcast free in Eastern Europe, as a gift to the newly liberated.
There was video of antiaircraft cannons starting and shuddering in pink-orange smoke as they fired, and there was video of a city burning at night, from a distance.
“Oh, Jesus,” Carl said. “Well, are we winning? What’s the score?”
Bombardment had only begun an hour or two before.
“They had to,” Jacob said.
“He is a bad man,” agreed.
“But it’s such a show,” Carl objected.
“It’s always a show,” Jacob answered.
—War is never good, said Mrs. Stehlíková in Czech. She could only have been following the tones of their voices. —It is blood and death.
—Well, that is also the truth, sighed her daughter.
As if to keep themselves aware of the lateness of the hour, the Stehlíks had not turned on any of the lights in their living room. Pale blue discharge from the television spilled erratically onto the faces of the group. Together they watched out two of the news program’s ten-minute cycles, and the war began to make a difference in the feeling of things. It seemed to pick out the Americans in the larger picture that Jacob kept in his mind. It seemed to daub Jacob, Carl, and Rafe each with a spot of bright paint. Somewhat irrationally, Jacob began to feel himself to be less of a guest in the Stehlíks’ living room. The war seemed to prove that the larger world was a setting where America was the principal actor, and therefore, by extension, a setting where Jacob ought to feel at home. The Stehlíks lived inside that world in the same way that Jacob lived inside theirs. A part of him felt ashamed of the grand entitlement that this sense of things implied, but he did not pretend to himself that he didn’t share it. He merely kept silent about it.
When Jacob and Carl returned downstairs, neither was ready to go to sleep, and they paused together in the kitchen. A radiator gurgled and plinked slowly, as the hot water drained out and it cooled down.
“Did you ever register for the draft?” Jacob asked.
“I must have. Don’t you have to, to get financial aid?”
“When I was seventeen, I wrote away to the Quakers for all this literature,” Jacob remembered.
“I don’t think it’ll last that long,” Carl hazarded.
Jacob didn’t want the war to take either of them away from Prague. Some of his high school friends had enlisted, and they were probably in the Middle East now, or on their way there. They were somehow protecting his fragile idleness. He realized that he had lost something of Prague already, since Luboš and since Carl’s arrival. The city had begun to seem less of a mystery; it had begun to put on a mask of familiarity.
They tried to guess whether the war was justified, but they didn’t know enough about it to guess intelligently. They couldn’t read Czech newspapers and couldn’t get any American ones. The kiosks only sold the one British newsmagazine; it was not until sev
eral weeks later that it would become possible to buy an American one.
“I hear there’s oil in them there parts,” Carl joked.
“The Marxists will have a field day.”
“You’ve been away. You’d be more skeptical if you’d been listening to them gear up for it.”
The dark and the stillness outside the kitchen held the two of them together; their presence to each other was more powerful than anything they might have claimed to believe. Jacob was taking brief glances at Carl’s beauty, at his slimness and at the pale delicacy of his skin, and it occurred to him that Carl might be growing his beard as a sort of courtesy, so that it would be that much harder for Jacob to fall in love with him again. Carl wouldn’t know that it didn’t have that effect.
* * *
By instinct, the friends all dropped in at Mel and Rafe’s apartment the next evening. They felt not only welcomed but comforted by the sight of Mel and Rafe’s lumpy brown sofa and the linoleum-topped folding table in their kitchen. As it happened, Rafe had been asked to accompany a deputation to Brussels, leaving the next morning, and it was decided that the impromptu gathering should therefore double as a send-off party for him. Thom and Carl were given as many pitchers as they could carry, which they took to a pub in the next street to have filled.
“It steams, in the cold,” Carl reported when he and Thom returned. “Its like carrying soup. It’s like carrying pitchers of life.” He and Thom set the pitchers down in a crowd on the kitchen table. “Sparta, anyone?” Carl offered.
“If there’s no better,” Annie hinted, but Jacob was already accepting one of the Sparty himself. He and Carl had smoked up his Marlboros, and they were economizing.
“You’ve gone native so quickly,” Melinda complimented Carl.
“The embassy is warning Americans not to be too visible.”
Henry nodded. “Terrorist reprisals.” He had read about it in the Czech papers.
“But we’re not Americans,” Melinda insisted. “Certainly Jacob isn’t. And now even Carl is becoming so well camouflaged.”
“What about me?” Rafe demanded.
“Cela va sans dire. You speak Arabic, darling.”
Bitter, gray smoke unwound in the air between the friends.
“The word on the street,” Henry further informed them, “is that the terrorists won’t do anything in Prague because they’re grateful to the Czechs for having sold them Semtex.”
There was nervous laughter. Melinda set some hard salami on a plate along with a knife to cut it with. The doorbell rang, and Thom said that it was probably Jana.
“Jana is nobody’s fool,” Melinda said admiringly while Thom was fetching her.
“She speaks English rather well, doesn’t she,” Annie concurred.
“And beautiful Czech,” Rafe added.
“What takes you to Brussels?” Henry asked, politely.
“A conference on armaments.”
“Negotiating them down?” Jacob wondered.
“Building them up! The Czechs have never before really had to decide for themselves how much they want. A hundred tanks? Two hundred? What about missiles?”
“Are they allowed to have missiles?”
“Sure! So long as they aren’t nukular. Fighter jets. Armored personnel carriers.”
“Do you like this kind of thing?” Jacob asked.
“Are you kidding? It gives me a big stiffy.”
His confession made them feel that it would be impolite to talk about the war with absolute disapproval in front of him, but luckily none of them were sure that they did disapprove absolutely.
Jana appeared and nodded a greeting to the group. No one had been able to admire her the other night, in the dark of Stalin’s tomb. Now they saw that she had the sort of fine complexion that freckles lightly even in midwinter, and that her hair was almost but not quite long and heavy enough to pull straight the loose curls in it. Thom seemed to hold his breath beside her, as if waiting for his friends to respond to her beauty.
“Pivo?” Rafe asked her. “We were deciding Czechoslovakia’s military policy.”
“In Prague foreigners always decide it,” she answered. “Yes, please, a beer.”
“In fact I only give advice,” Rafe protested.
“Do you write the reports?” Carl asked.
“Not officially.”
“In other words you do write them.”
“That’s classified. The number of tanks in Ostrava isn’t, but the authorship of the reports I write is.”
“How many tanks are in Ostrava?” Jana asked.
“Not enough!”
“Perhaps if there were more, it would, how do you say…” She made a gesture with two hands as if she were spreading something inside a basin, and she made a girlish sound effect as of something crashing.
“Collapse?” Rafe guessed.
“Sink?” she guessed. “It is so ugly and poisoned.”
“Oh no. Poor Ostrava!” To the others, he explained: “It’s a mining city.”
For a few minutes they held themselves crowded together in a single conversation, in order to welcome Jana and in order to give Rafe a chance to show off, in acknowledgment of the fact that they were about to lose him for a little while. But then Melinda broke the configuration, by touching Jana on the forearm and offering to show her the view from the balcony, such as it was, behind the bathtub in their kitchen. As the women moved away, the others shifted, too, some to refill their drinks and others to relax on the sofa in the living room, so that in a moment only the three Americans were left together.
“How did you learn Arabic?” Carl asked.
“Oh, the usual way, I suppose.” It was a vague answer; there was a touch of pettishness in it. Perhaps Rafe wished that Melinda had stayed beside him. “I took a semester in college. I figured, they have the oil.”
“How do you think it’ll go, in Kuwait?”
Rafe shrugged. His eyes focused on Carl and then drifted away. “It’s a question of getting all our stuff there. Our stuff and our boys. They don’t move quickly. But I think that enough of them got there before it started.”
“So you’re not worried.”
“I’m not worried about Kuwait.”
Unwatched by women, Rafe’s manner was slack, and Carl was taking advantage of his inattention to study him, in sidelong glances. Jacob wondered if Carl was trying to figure out whether Rafe was a spy. If Rafe were, it would have become second nature with him to sense suspicion and detection, as it was for Jacob. Was it disloyal of Carl to try to uncover one of their friends? In wartime, no less. If Rafe weren’t, suspicion might hurt his feelings even more. In that way too it would resemble Jacob’s secret.
“Is there room for more people on your balcony?” Jacob asked Rafe. “I’ve never seen it.”
“There’s not much to see,” Rafe answered. “Be my guest.”
“We keep our Hoover out here, I’m afraid,” Melinda apologized, as she and Jana made room for Jacob and Carl.
“I won’t trip on it.”
After the kitchen, the night air was empty of flavor. They had to stand four in a row, and the cold iron of the balustrade bit their fingers as they steadied themselves by gripping it. The balcony overlooked an empty, paved courtyard, lit by a parallelogram of night sky that happened to contain a gibbous moon, low and yellow.
“It’s cold,” Jacob complained.
“Cold keeps you honest,” Melinda answered.
“In that case I’d better go back in.”
“No, stay, the two of you. Tell us whether you’re afraid. I don’t require honesty.”
“Of bombs?” Jacob asked.
“Of anything.”
“Of anything,” Carl echoed. He stood nearest the door to the balcony, and Melinda stood farthest from it, and it seemed that she had chosen a piquant question to make sure it passed all the way down the chain and reached him. “We’re bold,” Carl decided.
“We are?” Jacob asked.
“We’re on the frontier. The Wild East. You are, anyway. I’m just a tourist.”
“The Wild Center,” Melinda corrected. “No one likes to be thought of as east anymore.”
“Are you English teachers?” Jana asked.
“Jacob is,” Carl answered. “I don’t know what I am.”
“Nor I,” said Melinda, “though I, too, teach.”
“I don’t understand what they expect us to do about this warning,” Jacob said. “If we were the type who stay home, we wouldn’t be in Prague.”
“But that’s it,” Carl replied. “They don’t want you here.” He was evolving one of his theories. “It’s the frontier, and there’s too much freedom. What if you got used to it?”
“Do you think that you are more free here, than in America?” Jana asked.
“Absolutely. Here there are no expectations.”
“There never are, for an exile,” Melinda suggested. “It’s a great privilege.”
“I do not think, that I feel this freedom,” Jana objected. “I feel—” She turned to Melinda for the translation of a word.
“Nerves,” Melinda supplied. “Anxiety.”
“I wonder if it lasts,” said Jacob. “Don’t you think that eventually here becomes your real here? The charmless here?”
“Now I wonder if we’re discussing exile,” Melinda said, “or merely adulthood.”
“The trailing clouds dissipate,” Jacob offered.
“Sort of,” she agreed.
“Were you a pretty child?” Carl suddenly asked Melinda. “I bet you were.”
She flushed. “I don’t know. You can’t ask a person that.”
“You were, is what you’re saying. You had a happy childhood and you miss it.”
“Don’t we all?” she answered. “No, I suppose that’s a terrible thing to say. There are unhappy childhoods.”
“But those people miss them even more, so you’re not wrong.”
“I’m going inside, before I embarrass myself further.”
“You haven’t. You couldn’t,” he said into the night air. Soon Jana, too, excused herself, and the two friends were left. They turned and looked frankly in at the party behind the glass.
The cold had whitened Carl’s face and reddened his fingers, Jacob saw as Carl lifted a cigarette to his lips. “I can fall for her, can’t I?” Carl asked. “I don’t want anything to happen. I mean, I know it isn’t going to.”