by Caleb Crain
They asked one another how work was, or in Carl’s case, how tourism was, without much listening to the answers. “Shall we?” Henry suggested, after each had placed a pack of cigarettes on the table before him.
“Let’s do it,” said Carl.
“Have you heard any of this already, in your capacity as flatmate?” Henry asked.
“Not a word.”
It was strange to read the story out loud. There were things in it that Jacob had said out loud before, if only to himself, when he was first grieving over Meredith, and there were other things that he had imagined saying out loud about her but had never actually spoken. He wasn’t ashamed of the words, or the feelings behind them, or the exposure he was trying to make of his feelings. What troubled him was his sense that he wasn’t exposing them. As he was reading, he began to feel that he was revealing, instead, no more than the fact that he had made a theater of his feelings, by himself and for himself, before he had come into the presence of Henry and Carl and without any reference to them. He felt dull and heavy. He wondered if he was clever enough to improvise, and when he decided he wasn’t, he began to resent his script a little. The words weren’t representing anything; he himself had got in their way somehow. He and they had trapped each other, and perhaps because of his growing resentment, he wasn’t able, while reading, to remember the words before he came to them in the course of reading, and he began to be startled by how many details he had included, however clumsily, and to become as apprehensive about where the story was headed as if he didn’t know—it was headed toward a description of his own frustrated lust, which he still couldn’t think of a way to avoid. He told himself he didn’t mind what Henry or Carl might think of the description, but he knew that he did mind letting them hear how solitary he had been while writing it. That was what was shameful. They could hear the size and emptiness of the imaginary room where he had thought the words up.
The silence afterward was first broken by Carl: “I didn’t see that coming.” Henry took in a breath but then let it go without saying anything.
“I let Kaspar read it,” Jacob said. He wanted to make it seem as if at least Kaspar had been somehow present in the room with him. “He didn’t think the story ended the way it did because I was gay.”
“Mmm,” said Henry. “You aren’t, are you?”
“Actually I am.”
“Oh, I see.” After a pause, Henry asked Carl, “Did you know about this?”
“I did,” said Carl. “I think Thom still doesn’t.”
“It’s how Carl and I met,” Jacob announced.
“No it isn’t,” Carl objected. “We met because of Louis.”
“I know, but Louis thought he was gay.”
“He did?”
“For a couple of weeks. He was hoping it was that instead of what it turned out to be.” To Henry, Jacob explained: “It turned out to be schizophrenia.” He knew he was being glib about Louis’s misfortune, but he felt rudderless, unable to stop himself without a sign from Henry, a suggestion of which way he was going to turn. “I did have hopes,” Jacob continued, addressing Carl again, “which you crushed.”
Henry spoke up: “There’s less fuss about that sort of thing, isn’t there, when both parties are men.”
“It’s live and let live,” Jacob quickly replied. This was one of Daniel’s ideas, and he liked the bragging rights that it entailed, though he didn’t really have enough experience himself to know for certain that it was true.
“Because you both know how men are,” Henry continued. He looked from Carl to Jacob and back to Carl again. He seemed to be deciding that he liked to be in on the secret, however belatedly. “It’s sort of Bloomsbury, for the two of you to become flatmates in the end.”
“It’s not that Bloomsbury,” Jacob hurried to say.
“It’s sort of Prague,” Carl suggested.
“The old regime falls, but no one gets laid,” Jacob glossed.
“It’s postrevolutionary,” Carl said. “The Prague Non-orgy.”
Václav heard something they couldn’t and scrambled under the shredded magazine pages in his cage. The three humans sat drinking their beers. The white-plastered walls and the white-painted furniture of the apartment had become so familiar to Jacob that he rarely asked himself any more what difference it made that he was living in Prague, but it now occurred to him that he wasn’t sure he could have read this story aloud in Boston. He couldn’t fairly ascribe the freedom that he felt to the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ revolution, now that he was spending so much time among expats. The society he and his friends were making together was more or less the opposite of what was usually claimed for Europe: they owed less to tradition, they could make fewer assumptions about one another. It was a second America, in a way; they were immigrants, living on a frontier, as Carl had called it, though an economic rather than a geographic one. A conversation about writing might have been richer in Boston, but Carl and Jacob would probably have been too absorbed in their romantic lives and their careers to have time for it. And in Boston Jacob would not have known anyone like Henry: a person on a quest. Nor, come to think of it, would Jacob have been as conscious of the questing side of Carl. Prague called it out in them. Here Carl and Henry could talk for hours over lunch about the purpose of life, without embarrassment. Without too much embarrassment, anyway. Carl couldn’t stop himself from kidding, but here he could have the conversation despite the kidding. What made it possible was the fact of Prague—the fact of being away from home (Henry had explained that even the Czechs sometimes worried about nezabydlenost, or not feeling at home, in Prague, which had been overrun, after all, by Austrians, Germans, Russians, and now Americans)—and the candor with which someone like Henry was willing to talk about his experiment. In England, Henry had had girlfriends, he had had a child, he had had a career, and he had left all of them in order to come here, learn Czech, and master the country’s politics without any apparent wish to intervene in them. He had come for adventure only, and in the light of his devotion to adventure, they were able to see their own steps in that direction more distinctly. Of course Henry wasn’t going to mind about Jacob. Jacob began to see why Carl made such a hero of him—why the two made such heroes of each other.
“I was cruised by a man Friday last,” Henry volunteered. “While crossing Letná.”
“What’s Letná?” Carl asked.
“The park around Stalin’s monument. Seemed quite lively. Do you know it?”
“No,” Jacob half lied. He had read about it in his guide, but he hadn’t tried it out.
“Mmm,” Henry continued. “But all this notwithstanding, I might agree with Kaspar. I don’t see that it’s necessarily you in the last scene. Given the Henry James story and all.”
Jacob had forgotten that the essay where he’d found the plot twist had been about James. He felt caught out, and he didn’t know what to say.
“I thought for certain you had it in mind,” Henry continued, evidently unsure how to proceed.
“What story is this?” Carl asked.
“A fellow visits the grave of a woman he knew,” Henry related, “and it’s only when he sees another man weeping at another woman’s grave that he realizes he could have had a love affair. Should have done, that is.”
“A love affair with the dead woman?” Carl asked.
“Yes, sorry. He never had one in the James story. He feels he’s never really lived.”
“But it’s the guy weeping who’s never really lived,” Jacob broke out. His verdict had a prudish, disapproving sound, even to himself. “If it’s the same guy weeping over the same woman.”
“But it isn’t, is it? Isn’t that the point?” Henry asked.
“In my story or in James’s? I mean, if James was gay, it wasn’t with a woman that he would have not had a life.”
“I’m all turned around,” said Carl.
“Me too,” said Henry.
They puzzled silently for a few moments. “Hang on, I’m wrong
,” Henry resumed, reconsidering. “It does matter whether it’s you at the end, and it matters whether you’re gay, because if you’re gay there’s no story, is there. It’s like what you said about my story. Your fellow’s not really in the story, once he turns out to be gay. You’re not in the story, that is. But you are in it, if you’re not.” Henry had pressed himself back and up in his chair, stiffly, in his excitement at handling an idea, homosexuality, that still carried a slight charge of taboo. “Because in the case where you’re gay, you haven’t failed to live your life, at least not yet. As you say. It’s regret that ties up the loose ends, that makes it a story. If you turn to the other fellow, it’s a kind of non sequitur. Not that I’m one to mind a non sequitur. It becomes a different story. The story turns without conclusion to another story.”
“Like a daisy chain,” said Carl.
“The Henry James is a story, and yours isn’t,” Henry summarized. “Yours doesn’t end properly. There’s something left out.”
It was a challenge. Henry was returning the blow that Jacob had struck when they had discussed his story, returning it not in a spirit of revenge, but as proof that he had taken it in good faith and liked Jacob well enough to hit him just as hard.
“I do know that Henry James story,” Jacob confessed.
“Aha,” said Henry, who seemed as pleased at the deceit as at the revelation.
“I haven’t read it, but I read an essay about it once.”
“That’s pretty postmodern of you,” Carl offered.
“I hate postmodernism.” Jacob noticed that his heart was pounding again as it had at Vyšehrad. “I hate it, and I seem to have written a story about wanting to live inside a story that’s already been written.”
“Or about not wanting to,” said Carl. “It’s a little ambiguous.”
* * *
From time to time Jacob worried that, surrounded now by expats, he was failing to get to know Czech language and culture. The day after the writing group’s meeting, for instance, the worry overtook him. He told himself he hadn’t come here to—but then he halted in his thoughts. What he was now doing was so formless he wasn’t sure how to describe it. Technically, the English, Irish, and Scots were as foreign to him as the Czechs and Slovaks were, but he couldn’t fool himself. He still couldn’t read a newspaper in Czech.
After teaching in , he headed downtown, alone, in the stern and aimless way that he had forced himself to explore the city in the fall, when he had first arrived. He bought a copy of Lidové noviny at a kiosk in Palmovka and puzzled over it during his ride. He rose from the subway at and drifted north past Mel and Rafe’s, along his old path, over the cobblestones of Melantrichova, with a dreamer’s sense of repetition, as if he were reciting a poem that he had recited so many times that the words had lost their meaning. A prayer, maybe. He decided to get lost, though he knew that with the map in his back pocket it would be hard to. He turned left. He turned left again. He found himself in a square that for a moment he didn’t recognize, but then he saw an antikvariát he knew. He hadn’t ever entered the square from this direction, but he had been here before. He had come one evening in search of a bar that he had heard was rough. It hadn’t been; none of the straight bars were. In that year, Czech drunks never did anything worse than sing and tell rambling stories. They were gentle for some reason—perhaps, Jacob speculated, because even in their cups they participated in the national mood of liberation and melancholy, the blanketing pensiveness about the old order passed away and the new one not yet come, or perhaps because they had learned, through living for decades under a regime where the smallest legal infraction could ruin a life, to get drunk quietly, and the habit hadn’t yet left them. If they lived a little longer in the marketplace, experience of rivalry and inadequacy might give them more of a wish to hurt one another. But they didn’t have much of one yet. Jacob had left the “rough” bar after half an hour, bored, and he kept walking now. Soon he was in a narrow street that he had never seen before, which didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. The river must be ahead of him, he thought vaguely, but he must have been wrong in thinking so, because he didn’t come to it. Through a tall door shutting behind a woman in a kerchief, he glimpsed a pasáž, lit at the far end by sunlight—sunlight on a pile of yellow sand—and after the woman turned a corner, he doubled back and opened the door himself.
The corridor was quiet, except for the faint echo of a bird somewhere nearby, chattering. The arched ceiling was low and of a smooth, dirty white stucco. It felt like a violation to walk down this pasáž, as it didn’t in those around Wenceslas Square or those that branched off Melantrichova. To reach the sunny patch he had to walk quite a ways through shadow, and while he was in it, a draft touched him on the forearm and chilled him. A pocket of winter air was hiding here in the darkness from the spring. In the sunlight, when he reached it, he found a shovel set in the sand, and next to it a blue plastic tub with rope handles. Next to that, someone had spilled a heap of white cobblestones. The courtyard was being repaved. He was afraid for a moment that he might have to retrace his steps, but another corridor seemed to lead out, at an angle, toward a different street. At the edge of the courtyard, from a metal trash can whose lid had been tipped up, a sparrow was fetching a thin red string. “They won’t like that,” Jacob warned the bird, as he passed into shadow again. “It’s not your string. It isn’t normal.”
Exiting into the new street, he again refrained from taking out his map. The cold air of the pasáže seemed to trail after him into the street, which was shaded by a tall First Republic building. He shivered. There was a pub in the ground floor, and Jacob realized he was hungry. He stepped inside.
A large room was roaring with conversation, its air dusty with cigarette smoke. No one noticed him. A sepia light fell through tinted windows. The diners and drinkers were workers, most of them in blue jumpsuits. He took a seat at one of the long dark tables, after asking permission of the men already sitting at it.
—Please, one of them said, with a gesture, and returned to a discussion with his friends.
The man’s face and forearms were dark from sun. He looked about thirty. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the blond stubble on his chin glittered as he talked. Around his beer glass, his fingers were thick and his fingernails oval. His eyes, however, were fine and quick, and he caught Jacob studying him. He nodded amiably.
Jacob unfolded his Lidové noviny. He attempted the lead story, which had eluded him on the train. Newspapers were written in a different register of Czech from the one he had learned to speak. They were full of the words for handling ideas, the equivalents of “approve,” “inquiry,” and “comparable,” assembled on the same pattern as the English words but from Slavic roots and prefixes instead of Latin ones. So once he was able to identify “refer,” it shouldn’t be hard to recognize “infer” and “transfer” and “defer”…
—Please, a waiter whined.
—Good day, Jacob said, but he saw, as he said it, that the waiter considered Jacob’s greeting a waste of his time. —What do you have in the way of ready food? Jacob added, trying to be more purposeful.
The waiter sighed dramatically. —I’ll bring you a menu. He began to stalk off.
—But please, Jacob said. The waiter would bring the tourist menu, overpriced, if he wasn’t stopped. —Do you have pork meat with cabbage and dumplings?
—Of course.
—Thus, one, please, and one beer.
—Thus, the waiter agreed. He seemed relieved. Evidently he hadn’t wanted to fleece Jacob if he didn’t have to. In blue ink he wrote the price of the dish on a slip of gray paper; he slashed once, below the number, to represent Jacob’s beer; and he anchored the slip under the ashtray nearest Jacob.
—It isn’t a bother, if I smoke? Jacob asked the men at his table. They had finished eating—they had stacked their plates—so Jacob thought they wouldn’t mind. There were three of them. Besides the quick-eyed man, there was a heavyset one with
a ragged beard and a sharp-looking one with his black hair smarmed and his sleeves rolled up.
—Not at all, answered the quick-eyed man.
Jacob nodded his thanks. Now he had more of their attention than he was comfortable with. He felt lucky that he was smoking Sparty rather than Marlboros today, though he wondered if even Sparty might seem a little precious here. The men were watching him. He tapped nervously on the little blue trireme that decorated the pack. —If you would like…, it occurred to him to offer, and he held out the open pack to them.
It was as if he had enchanted them, or as if he had broken an enchantment. They laughed and accepted. They were drunker than he had realized.
—Thanks many times, the quick-eyed man said. Jacob nodded again but then looked away, because the man seemed so at ease in his skin that he was hard to resist, and Jacob didn’t want to gawk. He didn’t want to offend them.
The workers, however, didn’t seem to fear that the rapport was fragile. “Hele,” the quick-eyed man hailed Jacob. —Look, where are you from? He was addressing Jacob informally; he was quite drunk.
—From America.
—That’s what I told you, said the sharp-looking man, as he lightly thumped the table.
—Look, the quick-eyed man again addressed Jacob, as if the injunction would help Jacob cross the language barrier. —And in what way do you work?
Jacob couldn’t help but return the man’s amiable gaze. In America the return might have triggered either a suspicion that Jacob was gay or a suspicion that Jacob was mocking the man, or both, but here there was no interruption. The man and Jacob seemed able to look at each other fondly without either thinking the worse of the other, though their eyes didn’t lock, because the worker’s frame wobbled slightly from drink and his eyes didn’t compensate for the wobble, for the same reason. —In what way? Jacob repeated, uncertain of the meaning of the question.
—Yeah, and forgive, but also, how much does it pay, if it isn’t a bother?
The other two workers fell expectantly silent. —Not at all, Jacob said. They wanted to hear the good news.