by Caleb Crain
Such, anyway, were his plans. He held them in mind anxiously as he climbed the stairs. Children live in a world of their own, and his plans always felt to him like an interruption of it. No matter how willing the children were to cooperate, he felt himself to be driving them out of their natural track and sensed the propriety of their resistance. A part of him would rather have shared in their wildness. In the course of the hour, as they grew fatigued, they would fall back into the comfort and support of the environment that Milena wove around them, which was itself another pattern that he felt himself to be compromising. Because she fed him, he felt the pull of her support much as they did.
As he climbed the stairs, his calves trembled; he was drinking and smoking too much. He heard light footfalls and saw Prokop appear at the head of the stairs and then slouch against a wall, shyly and impatiently. Anežka hid herself behind him and then peeped out to say, “Ahoj!” her voice like a little bell. Prokop pivoted backward as if his body were a roller crushing her against the wall, and she darted away.
Jacob paused to catch his breath. “Ahoj, hello.”
“Hello,” replied Prokop, putting on a plummy British movie-actor’s voice. Below Jacob, Milena laughed doubtfully.
When Jacob reached the dining room, he saw that the guest was Ladislav, a small boy with sunken eyes and black hair. Ladislav was waiting in his seat at the table, unsure of his liberty in a strange house. Jacob greeted him, and the boy acknowledged the greeting with a nod that almost amounted to a bow.
“Please,” Milena said. As ever, she insisted that Jacob place himself at the head of the table. In the middle of the table, Anežka’s doll sat with her back to Prokop’s trolley car. The toys had become a part of their ritual, as was the exchange that next occurred. Jacob asked the children in English how they were, and after they had answered and, at Milena’s prompting, asked him in turn, Milena interrupted. “But you must first to eat,” she said.
“It’s very kind of you, but you don’t have to feed me.”
“But I want. Do you like it, guláš?”
“Very much.”
She brought him a plate, still steaming, of thick beef stew, which paprika had turned burnt sienna, accompanied by small, whitish-yellow potatoes as clean and polished as bird’s eggs. It was twice as much food as he would have been served in a restaurant. The children waited politely. In the tall, broad windows behind them, the day was dying. A black, ropey mantle was being unrolled and lowered, and it was lit from below, as it descended, by a faint pink wash cast by the sun. If asked about the view, Jacob would have denied that it meant anything, but it’s difficult to take a thing like the sky ironically.
He pushed away his plate and made an effort. He lay the postcards face down in the middle of the table and had the children draw them one at a time, like cards from a deck, and challenge one another with the images. “Who is it?” They recognized Mickey Mouse and Albert Einstein, but Marilyn Monroe was mistaken for Madonna, and the children drew a blank on many of the faces, even when Jacob supplied the names. Jacob had to explain, and the point of the exercise was soon lost in pidgin storytelling.
Sooner than he had planned to, Jacob moved on to his second idea. He took a bag of rice and a single winter glove from his bag.
—You’re still hungry? Prokop said.
“Wise guy,” Jacob replied.
“Wh—, wh—,” Prokop tried to mimic the words.
“Moudrý chlap,” Jacob translated. “‘Wise guy.’” Now they all repeated the phrase.
Jacob set the bag of rice before Prokop and the glove before Ladislav. Then he took off his wristwatch and set it before Anežka. “Jééé,” Prokop exclaimed of the watch, enviously, and Anežka, pleased that it was hers for the moment, wriggled into a kneeling position in her chair.
“What’s that?” Jacob asked Prokop, pointing at the rice.
Prokop didn’t know the word. “How do you say rýže,” he asked out of the side of his mouth, with pretend furtiveness.
“Reese,” his mother supplied.
“Rice,” Jacob corrected.
“It is a rice,” Prokop answered.
“‘It’s rice,’” Jacob again corrected.
“It’s rice.”
“How much is it?”
“H—, h—.”
“How much?”
“How much,” Prokop succeeded in repeating.
Jacob took a large white-metal coin out of his pocket. “How much is it? Is it five crowns?”
“Is five crowns,” Prokop agreed, as he saw the meaning of the question.
“‘It’s five crowns.’”
“No, is ten crowns,” Prokop revised.
“‘It’s ten crowns.’”
“It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said at last.
“I’ll take it,” Jacob told him, and substituted for the rice a honey-colored ten-crown note, withdrawn from his wallet, from which stared a mustachioed man in an Inverness cape and a polka-dot cravat. A detective or a magician. “Thank you!”
“You are welcome.”
“No, in America, you say, ‘Thank you,’ too.”
—Truly?
“Yes, because I’m giving you money.” Jacob pointed so that the meaning of his words would be clear.
“Thank you!” Prokop said. Then he repeated, as if for the mere pleasure of saying it: “How much!”
“Now you buy Ladislav’s glove. Ask him what it is, first.”
Ladislav stumbled, predictably, in omitting the indefinite article before “glove.” If Jacob had had any foresight, he would not have brought one prop that was a mass noun and one that was a count noun. “A glove, a watch, rice,” he interrupted, in an attempt to clarify. “A doll, a trolley.”
Prokop asked to run through the exchange again, first snatching back the ten-crown note from Ladislav and restoring to him the glove. This time, when Ladislav said, “It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said, “Five crowns!” somewhat belligerently. Ladislav laughed once, startled but amiable.
“Say ‘That’s too high,’” Jacob suggested to Prokop. “‘How about five crowns?’”
“How about,” Prokop repeated. “How much. How about.” With the new phrase he offered Ladislav five crowns for the glove. Ladislav glanced to Jacob for guidance.
“It’s up to you,” Jacob told him. “You can say, ‘Okay, five crowns,’ or ‘No, it’s ten crowns.’”
“No, a glove is ten crowns,” Ladislav decided.
—Then no, Prokop retorted in Czech.
“‘No, thank you,’” instructed Jacob.
“No thank you,” Prokop repeated, with a farcical sullenness.
—Is it my turn? Anežka asked, twisting high in her chair with impatience.
Jacob asked in English about her watch.
“Jak se sto?” she asked in reply.
“A hundred,” he told her.
“Hun’red crown,” she mumbled shyly.
“‘It’s a hundred crowns,’” Jacob insisted on her saying, and once she repeated the sentence, he rewarded her with a hammy reaction: “A hundred crowns! That’s way too high.”
“No! A hundred crowns!” Prokop interjected, taking his sister’s side.
“How about twenty?” Jacob offered.
—Yes, said in Czech, before Prokop could refuse on her behalf.
“‘Okay,’” Jacob prompted her to say, but she understood him to be agreeing in his own person and handed him the watch. In exchange he gave her a twenty-crown note, on which a blue couple in tweed read a book by the light of the sun and an oversize atom. She fluttered it in a celebratory way, as if she were curtsying and it were a ribbon.
“How much!” Prokop said accusingly, pointing at the watch in front of Jacob. Though it felt like play money to Jacob, it was real to the children, who didn’t ordinarily handle it, and it seemed to be exciting them. Jacob wondered if he had made a mistake in introducing it into the game without explaining first that he was going to take it all back at the end. “How much!�
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“‘How much is it.’”
“How much is it,” Prokop repeated.
“It’s a hundred crowns.”
“Wise guy!” Prokop shouted. Everyone laughed. Seeing that he had scored a point, Prokop loudly repeated the exclamation until his mother had to ask him to speak normally.
“It’s a hundred crowns,” Jacob insisted in a level voice.
Prokop eyed his own bill and the bill in his sister’s hand. “How about thirty crowns,” he offered.
“Okay,” Jacob agreed, because he wanted to see what Prokop would do.
Prokop grabbed the bill from his sister and, adding it to his own, threw the two notes at Jacob. “Thank you!” he said demandingly, palm outstretched.
Jacob surrendered the watch, and as soon as he did, there was screaming, because Anežka felt that it was now as much hers as Prokop’s. In their greed the children lost all inhibition, and Milena had to pry the watch from their fingers. As she handed it to Jacob, she said, “Please.”
She spoke sternly to her children in Czech, too quickly for Jacob to follow. Prokop, who seemed to receive the more severe reprimand, scowled and kicked the legs of his chair. Jacob wanted to signal that he was not himself upset. He slipped his watch into a pocket, and to continue the game, he placed the doll before Anežka and the trolley before Prokop, and gave the thirty crowns to Ladislav. There was a touch of danger in the air.
At Jacob’s cue, Ladislav asked, “What is that?” and pointed to Prokop’s trolley. Not family, Ladislav had had to suppress any wish he might have had to join the scuffle for the watch, and he had not been scolded, so the energy in his voice was now higher than that of the siblings. Jacob sensed, in a momentary intuition, that the trolley was a toy that Prokop had never before allowed Ladislav to handle, and that Ladislav foresaw a happy coincidence of the game’s public reward and a private, maybe even secret wish. “What is that?” Ladislav repeated, in the spirit of one who presses a second time the button of an apparatus that is balky about starting.
Prokop touched the trolley with one finger, as if to remind himself of it, and then, as if the touch did remind him, took it up in both hands, bringing it close to his face so he could peer into its dark windows, running the rear wheels against his palm to hear the slow, razzy scratching of the inertial engine inside. “It is a tramway,” he quietly said.
“A tram,” Jacob amended.
“It is a tram,” Prokop said, again quietly. His eyes slowly left the toy to meet those of the boy who threatened to take it from him. The possibility of a confrontation seemed to alarm Ladislav, who glanced at Jacob in the hope of a late revision to the rules of the game, which Jacob could not see a way to engineer without embarrassing Prokop—without interpreting aloud, perhaps wrongly, the change in his demeanor. The rules obliged them all to continue. “How much is it?” Ladislav asked, holding himself perfectly still.
Jacob, too, held his breath. Prokop put the trolley in his lap, under the table and out of sight, and swung his legs back and forth so that his body rocked. “How much?” Prokop repeated, as if he were registering the significance of the question. Then with a quick gesture he popped the trolley back onto the table. “Ten crowns,” he announced.
“Ten crowns?” It seemed to Ladislav too good to be true.
“It’s a bargain,” Jacob said, with relief.
“I’ll take it,” Ladislav hurriedly added.
Prokop did not watch him take it but merely folded his arms and leaned forward over the table. Ladislav forgot the others in his admiration of the cleverly bent tin of the trolley’s steps, benches, and pillars. Prokop waited, aware that Ladislav had twenty crowns left and that Anežka doll remained unbought.
Anežka had seated the doll on the table before her and had brought her own body flush with the edge of the table to support its back, which was curved forward by the pull of its heavy, drooping head. It smiled its consistent smile. Anežka leaned her own head forward to speak some words of advice into its ear.
Prokop cleared his throat and looked meaningfully at the doll.
“What is it?” Ladislav dutifully asked, sensing that justice had to be done.
For the moment Anežka was pleased by Ladislav’s attention. “It is Anežka,” she told him. She was remembering, Jacob realized, the lesson about greetings and introductions.
Ladislav paused, but Prokop, with his eyes, demanded that he continue. “How much is…she?” Ladislav asked.
Oh dear, a slave market, Jacob thought. Anežka was nonplussed.
“How much?”
—But I refuse! Anežka said, in Czech.
“You could set a high price,” Jacob suggested. “You could say a thousand crowns, or ten thousand crowns.”
—But I refuse altogether! she declared, now with a quaver in her voice.
—You have to. It’s the game, Prokop said.
—I don’t have to. I won’t.
“How much!” Prokop said, returning to English. He saw that it was the mere possibility of sale that unnerved his sister. “How much!”
“How about selling a pen instead?” Jacob proposed, drawing attention to his own and placing it, somewhat desperately, before her.
—But I don’t want to! I refuse to!
—But you don’t have to, Jacob assured her, lapsing into Czech himself in order to be sure that the message got through.
—But calm yourself, little Anežka, her mother said, and held the girl’s shoulders. —In fact nothing is being bought and nothing is being sold. But the girl hugged her doll and would not meet their eyes.
“How much!” Prokop said, pointing at the lonely glove in front of Ladislav, who didn’t know whether he should answer. “How much!” Prokop said again, a little more violently, pointing at his lost trolley. “How much!” he asked, still more loudly, of the paper bag of rice in front of Jacob. “How much, how much, how much!” He shook himself, full of a child’s pleasant, dizzy hysteria.
—That suffices, his mother said.
“How much?” he asked once more, rebelliously, of the ten-crown note that he had been left with. He thought he was asking a nonsense question.
—That already suffices, Milena warned.
“That depends on your credit rating,” Jacob answered.
“Wha-a-at?”
“Nothing. Nic,” Jacob retracted the joke. But having aroused the boy’s curiosity, he had to continue. —Money costs more money, he explained in Czech. —If I give you ten crowns today, then next week you must give me eleven.
“Jo?” Prokop responded, as he took this in. Then, with a show of make-believe anxiety, he pushed his note across the table to Jacob and signaled to Ladislav to do the same with his. Ladislav hurriedly complied. Their fluster was like that of silent-movie characters. It wasn’t clear they understood. It seemed more likely that Jacob’s explanation was interpreted as a sort of ruse—as a polite way of asking for the return of the bills. The lesson was drawing to a close. Jacob also collected the Warhol postcards, which had been left scattered on the table where they had fallen.
Milena retreated briefly to the kitchen and returned with a sheaf of ten- and twenty-crown bills. She counted his fee out onto the table with her habitual fumbling and overcaution, bill by bill. There it was, the accumulation they had been playing with, the disruptive element, purchasing him in the colors of mud and of berries. To Milena, there was nothing shameful in money, but Jacob was afraid that Prokop might cry out “How much!” or that Anežka would find a way to ask why, if he loved them, he had to be paid to visit. Because he had lost control of the children twice, he felt unsure that he deserved his full fee, a particular doubt that resonated with a deeper and more general one, less accessible to his conscious mind. Despite his sense of vulnerability, however, the children didn’t cry out. They felt the reality of the transaction and respected it, retreating into themselves. Anežka petted and consoled . Prokop, still fidgety, beat Ladislav at a game that resembled Rock Paper Scissors. Jacob sho
ved the cash into his wallet, which the many small bills fattened.
He bid good-bye to the oblivious children. Anežka, who had forgiven him, answered softly, sucking in her breath. Prokop, who had insulated himself with a force field of excitement, barked a cheerful farewell. At the edge of the table, the trolley lay unregarded, unclaimed. Prokop had not returned to it the way Anežka had returned to her doll. The thought of it stayed with Jacob as he walked up the dark street to wait for the bus. He told himself it would be absurd to feel guilty about it. It was normal for boys to outgrow such attachments, especially straight boys. In fact, the guilty thing would have been to teach Prokop to hold on to a doll, the way Anežka was doing, and as Jacob himself had often tried to when he was a child. A spark clinked in a street light overhead. All around him the night was mild and empty.