by Caleb Crain
“Prawn is sufficient,” said Thom.
“Did I offer any to you? Perhaps I didn’t hear myself if I did.”
Jacob had to guess how many lessons his class had advanced in his absence. He made his guess and then skimmed through a couple of lessons more, to hedge his bets. As nine o’clock approached, the Czech teachers quietly gathered their papers, and his friends, too, rose. Melinda dawdled so that she could walk upstairs with him.
“What are you doing later?” she asked.
“I’m teaching your chemists.”
“Oh, bugger them. Will you have dinner with me?”
“Sure. Shall I bring Carl?”
“Let it be just us. Pick me up at my boyfriend’s flat?”
“Isn’t it your flat, too?”
“I meant to sound daring. I’m trying that out.”
“Oh, definitely.”
“There’s a new place near us, a project of the Vietnamese consulate, and it’s in my opinion the best restaurant in Prague at the moment. Actual Asian cuisine. Not chopped into bits and fried in soy sauce. There’s a lemon-onion soup, I wish I could remember the name. It’s very simple but rehabilitating. The soup, not the name of it. You can feel coal dust being flushed from your sinuses.”
“Is that pleasant?”
“And there are no caraway seeds whatsoever.”
“I just remembered. My hamster is loose.”
“Is that a thing to say to a nice girl?”
“I mean I have to go home and catch it.”
“Can’t Carl?”
“I haven’t asked him to.”
“Shall I?”
“Will you see him this afternoon?”
“I might do.”
“Then it’s a date.”
* * *
In addition to the British newsmagazine that he bought in Prague, Jacob read magazines forwarded by his mother from America, including a serious one that Daniel wrote for, though not the glossy one where he worked as an editor. (He sometimes caught himself referring to Daniel by his full name. It had been months since he had heard him speak in anything but the public voice of his articles.) He had got into the habit of giving them to the chemists when he was through with them.
He had more issues than usual to slide out to the center of their dark table that afternoon. They scrambled for them deftly and a little savagely, like geese darting their necks at bread crumbs. Ivan watched, over a notepad where he was pretending to review the lesson of two weeks ago, flattening his cowlick patiently; to contend for an issue himself would have been out of keeping with the dignity of his role as liaison between Jacob and the group, and he limited his response to a comment, whose tone was sardonic and semiofficial. Jacob couldn’t follow his meaning, and the elderly Bohumil, observing his puzzlement, explained: “We keep a library of all that you give to us, and we are not to—what is the word—to plunder, I think.”
In Bohumil’s own hands was a cover story that Daniel had written arguing the case for gay marriage, marked with a bright pink triangle. To read, Bohumil had to look down into his thick glasses, and the old man’s eyes momentarily vanished.
Across the table, Zuzana, the young brunette who hid her beauty in a lab coat, nervously studied the table of contents in the magazine she had taken, tilting it toward the well-tailored Pavel beside her, for his reaction, as if unsure whether she had made a good choice. Noticing that Bohumil had begun to read his, she addressed him. —What do you have, Bohumil? she asked, in Czech. —Show.
—And you show, too, he replied. He stood his magazine up, face out, for her inspection, and she flopped shut the cover of hers and leaned it toward him, for his.
“That is the sign, I think, of the guise,” she said in English, looking to Jacob for confirmation.
Jacob didn’t want to seem to understand too quickly. “The gays,” he corrected, after a moment.
There was an echo as several chemists practiced the pronunciation.
“They are going to marry,” Bohumil said, relishing the topic with the impunity of his age.
“To marry,” Zuzana repeated, slowly smiling at Bohumil’s freedom as she understood. “That is interesting.”
“They’re going to talk about it, anyway,” Jacob said. “It’s not a done deal.”
They made him write “done deal” on the chalkboard. “Fait accompli,” said Bohumil’s wife, Zdenka, half to herself, as she figured it out, almost warbling the words on account of their French origin.
“But they can marry now,” Ivan said, “if a gay marries a lesbian.” He looked to Jacob for praise, and Jacob tried to smile. There were murmurs as the other chemists established among themselves that the word “lesbian” meant what it evidently did. Ivan’s head was large, the way a child’s was, Jacob noticed, and trembled slightly as if with the effort of being held up. Jacob was glad that no one had laughed but slightly embarrassed for Ivan’s sake.
“It is curious,” Bohumil resumed, “that they want to marry. They will lose freedom.”
“This depends,” his wife answered, addressing the group rather than her husband, “on this, how is the marriage.”
“Touché,” said Jacob.
“Ah, as in…,” said Bohumil, and he waved an imaginary sword. Zdenka wildly waved one, too, to second his understanding.
“Tell me,” Zuzana queried Jacob, “will the people vote the question?”
“Surely,” Pavel broke in, his brows knitted, “it is to the Assembly.”
“But pardon me, there are two houses in the American parliament, that yes?” Ivan asked.
“It’s confusing,” Jacob said. He drew a diagram on the blackboard to explain that the proper word was “Congress,” and that it could be used to refer either to the House of Representatives alone, or to both the House and the Senate.
“It is to the Congress,” Bohumil said, pointing at Jacob’s nested circles, “if it is a matter of law. But it is to the Court, I think, if it is a matter of justice. This writer,” he continued, meaning Daniel, as his eyes vanished again into the refraction of his lenses, “wishes it a matter of law, though I do not understand why.”
“Conservatives always prefer for Congress to decide,” Jacob offered, as a hint to the mystery, “and Daniel is a sort of conservative.”
“He is for gay marriage?” Bohumil said doubtfully. “Yet he is conservative?”
“Daniel’s like that,” Jacob said, retreating into the colloquial, to hide from anyone who didn’t want to understand.
“You call him Daniel,” Zuzana observed.
“I knew him in America.”
There was a delicate pause. “It is very interesting,” Bohumil supplied, to cover it, and leaning back in his chair he quietly summarized the issues in Czech for his wife’s benefit, his neighbors leaning in to overhear his explanation and nodding as they took it in.
Ivan raised his hand, and Jacob quickly granted him the permission that no one else in the room felt the need to ask for. “You in America,” Ivan said, “have two parliaments, and we in Czechoslovakia have two presidents.” Again Jacob failed to understand that Ivan was joking until after he had finished speaking, Ivan’s eyes were so skittish, and he kept the pitch of his voice so deliberately low.
“No one I’ve met seems to like Klaus,” Jacob hazarded.
The chemists seemed unsure how to respond. “He is doing what is perhaps necessary,” Ivan cautiously began, in his semiofficial capacity.
“As he says,” Zuzana interrupted.
“But it is difficult for us, in the results,” Ivan continued. “The prices increase, but the wages do not.”
“We are nervous,” Zuzana said, with a shrug.
Jacob nodded. He recalled that had described her father with the same adjective, and he wondered if he had missed a nuance. “Nervozní,” Jacob asked, using the Czech word, “what does it mean exactly?”
“Nervozní? It is to be—,” Zuzana started to explain, and then tightened her body in demonstration.
“No,” Zuzana answered, shaking her head. “It is to respond too, too…” She circled her hands around each other, as if winding a skein.
“Perhaps sometimes it can include anger,” Bohumil said, speculatively.
“It sounds like it’s like it is in English,” Jacob said. “I don’t know why I thought it might be different.”
“All was here the same for so long,” said Bohumil, “that we are not accustomed to the use of so many of our nerves, and perhaps the new use makes some of us angry.”
“We are afraid, perhaps,” said Ivan, smiling in hopes of matching Bohumil in wit, “because the Communists were saying, for many years, that under capitalism, the poor are living in the streets. They were telling us, that the poor are asking for money, to buy food. What is the word for it, please?”
“Begging,” Jacob said.
“They were telling us that the poor are begging in the American cities,” Ivan continued, his boyish frame quivering with half-suppressed amusement.
“It was a propaganda,” Zuzana agreed. She shook her head to assure Jacob that she hadn’t believed it any more than Ivan had.
Jacob was at a loss. Pavel clasped his hands in his lap and then glanced up. A moment passed. “But in fact it is true, I think,” said Pavel.
—But no, Zuzana reproved him in Czech, under the impression that he was teasing. —Why do you say that? Murmuring washed over the room, as the slower students asked to be caught up.
—I saw it, Pavel replied.
Zuzana realized he was serious. —When?
—In eighty-seven. In Chicago. They open the doors, and you are to give them coins. They carry sacks of their things with them, all together. All dirty.
“Surely not,” Ivan said, in English, contradicting Pavel but looking steadily at Jacob.
“The term people use is ‘the homeless,’” Jacob said, returning Ivan’s gaze and then glancing away. He chalked the word on the blackboard behind him. He felt a strange pleasure in disillusioning Ivan.
A blankness fell over Zuzana’s features.
“The homeless,” Bohumil echoed, and then added, absentmindedly, “Where is my home?” the translated title of a Czech folk song, as if his interest went no further than the vocabulary word. He continued to flip through the magazine in his hands, signaling by the continued movement his lack of surprise at the revelation. “It is too bad,” he said mildly.
Ivan kept his eyes fixed on Jacob, as if he could not now afford to let his attachment to Jacob, and to America through him, seem to falter, even momentarily. “I did not know this,” he admitted.
* * *
After class Ivan cornered Jacob. “May I walk with you? You take the bus number one hundred forty-four, I think.”
“I’m headed that way.”
“Headed that way,” Ivan repeated, self-pedagogically. As Jacob squared his books, his papers, and the school tape recorder inside his backpack, he felt the eyes of the other chemists noticing Ivan as they said good-bye. Jacob returned their good-byes bravely, as if no secret were implied by Ivan’s lingering, but he, too, suspected that a secret was forthcoming. As he walked down the institute’s corridor with Ivan, he became unpleasantly aware of the care with which Ivan matched the pace of his steps.
“So it is not a fiction, as I thought, that people are begging in America,” Ivan said. He seemed as willing to be amused by his misplaced confidence as he had been a few minutes ago by what he had imagined to be the crudeness of Communist propaganda. “This is, how do you say, a depression.”
“It’s depressing,” Jacob corrected.
After the Victorian-parlor heaviness of the scientists’ meeting room, the parking lot and the long muddy field that approached the institute looked spare and modern. There was still snow along one edge of the pavement, in a dirt-tipped, crumpled archipelago, but a mild March wind was loosening the world, opening it, the way meltwater opens the soil and makes it crack and breathe. About one more hour of daylight remained; it would take Jacob that long to reach Rafe and Melinda’s place downtown.
“Do you know, the Communists were very proud of their Czech chemists,” Ivan continued. “Like athletes, we were for propaganda. But under capitalism we must pay for ourselves.” As they crossed the parking lot, Ivan walked so close to Jacob that he inadvertently jostled him: “Oh, pardon me!” It was unusual for a Czech to come so near, and Jacob found himself unpleasantly conscious of Ivan’s thin blond hair, boxy plastic glasses, and prominent nose.
“I don’t think any of you chemists will end up homeless.”
“But do you know, already I do not have a home. I have a wife and two children, and we live in the flat of my mother-in-law and father-in-law.”
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said weakly.
“Oh no, it is very common. It is the way, under socialism. Do you know, how many years I am waiting for a flat?”
“How many?”
“Eleven years. Since marriage. And now I have a son nine years old and a daughter four.”
“That’s terrible,” Jacob said.
“But excuse me. I do not want to talk to you about the Czech homeless. (Oh, pardon me! Again!) I have, rather, a question. If I may.”
“Sure.”
“Could you tell me, how did you become an English teacher? For you know, it is a very wonderful thing now, in Prague, and I think that if I could become an English teacher, it would be a very good thing for me.”
“But you’re a chemist. You went to school for it, didn’t you?”
“Do you think,” Ivan persisted, “that my English is so good to teach it?”
“‘Is good enough to teach it.’”
Ivan repeated the correct wording. “So, perhaps, it is not so good, you are saying.”
“No, no,” Jacob assured him. “You speak very well.”
Because the air was bright and fresh, the ground around them empty, and both of them young, it was possible to imagine that either of them could become anything he wanted. And Ivan’s English was in fact quite good. Jacob found himself remembering, almost as a matter for self-reproach, that he himself had wandered into the language instruction office of the Prague school system as if he had conjured it. That was capitalism, after all, when it was going well; your wishes seemed to rise up to meet you.
“The English book that you have, from the school. Would it be possible, do you think, that I could borrow it? To learn, for myself. Also, with this book, I think that I myself could teach lessons. Do you think it is possible?”
For a moment, Jacob wondered if Ivan wanted to steal the class of chemists from him, but he suppressed the fear as uncharitable. Since he only had the one book and couldn’t do without it for long, he suggested that Ivan copy it on one of the institute’s photocopy machines the next time Jacob visited the institute.
“But I don’t know if you should give up on chemistry,” Jacob felt obliged to say. It was harder to communicate, now that it was between them that Ivan wanted the use of something Jacob controlled. “There’s a demand for English teachers now, but science will be more important in the long run.”
They were nearing the bus stop, and Ivan let Jacob step away from him. “But this is perhaps something, that I cannot wait for.”
Jacob thought of Ota, but Ivan was a scientist, and he probably saw things more clearly than Ota did. It would be a kind of rudeness to keep warning him. He would risk seeming stingy and repressive. He reached out to shake Ivan’s hand, which startled the fragile-looking man, and they parted.
* * *
In the Havelská arcade that led to Mel and Rafe’s apartment, plastic lamps had long ago been drilled into the stone medieval ceiling. When Jacob arrived, their yellow light had not yet crystallized against the evening; it still offered itself only as a supplement to the dark but vivid light from the sky, which, though clear, was the color of lake water before a storm. Jacob’s hand, as he raised it to Mel and Rafe’
s buzzer, seemed to partake of the conflicting elements; a faint gilt rested on the tops of his fingers, while his palm seemed dripping with a shadowy blue, below.
He heard footsteps and then a scratching as the lock was worked. “Would you like to come up, or are you in a rush?” Melinda asked. She had changed into a white linen blouse with a high, almost clerical collar.
“Either way,” said Jacob.
“Well, you’re welcome to come up.” She said it a little shortly, maybe because Jacob had forced her to answer her own question. “Rafe’s here,” she added, as she preceded him up the narrow stairs.
She called her boyfriend’s name as she nudged open the door to their apartment and as Jacob followed her in. Rafe emerged from their bedroom, grinning, unkempt. “Jacob! Feeling better?” he said. “You look better.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean, you look well. I’ve never actually seen you look worse, so you can’t look better, can you. Sorry I can’t join you,” he said, explaining, apologetically: “Work.”
“What are you working on?”
“Will you have a drink? Slivovits? Becher?”
Jacob looked to Melinda, but she gave no sign. “I don’t want to put you to the trouble…”
“Oh, come on. Have a drink.”
“Some water would be fine.”
“Water? You’re such a cheap date! I bet you’re easy, too, aren’t you?”
“The water drinkers rarely are, in my experience,” Melinda interposed.
“In your experience,” Rafe continued to goof from the kitchen, as he poured Jacob a glass from the tap. He looked into the pantry, as if he might take something stronger for himself.
Jacob drank his water half down for lack of knowing what to say. “So what are you working on?” he again asked Rafe.
“Oh, a white paper,” he answered. “Now that there’s only one superpower, I have to prove to the Europeans that mutually assured destruction is a game that can be safely played as a solitaire.”
“Can it really? How does it work?”
“If anyone looks cross-eyed at America, we blow ourselves up!”
“Brilliant!” Jacob said, hoping to match Rafe’s ironic enthusiasm.