by Caleb Crain
* * *
The friends decided to revisit the yellow-walled cellar in Malá Strana where they had given Michael a farewell party in the fall. According to Henry, it had grown a bit louche. The place was set up like a speakeasy, Jacob remembered, as Henry led him, Annie, and Thom edgewise through the ground-floor restaurant to the stairwell at the rear. They descended into stale air, which Jacob wasn’t immediately reconciled to breathing. German girls with angry eye shadow were sitting below the landing, blocking the narrow staircase, and the girls swore idly at the friends as they passed.
The bar and the unevenly plastered walls were unadorned, as before. Jacob thought he remembered that they had been playing tapes of jazz music in the fall, but weak speakers now emitted American punk—a thin gray stream of sound that the mutter and talk of the rooms easily broke through. To Jacob the room seemed vaguely menacing, and he felt self-conscious and detached, as if a bully were sizing him up; he felt the need to put up a bluff.
Henry volunteered to fetch drinks. Jacob, Annie, and Thom claimed a corner table. Someone had cut into the wall beside their seats the Czech word for gypsies and the German word for out. Tourists had written their names in ballpoint pen and then dated their inscriptions.
“Ehm, so, we’re off to Krakow tomorrow fortnight,” Annie announced, apropos of nothing.
“Are ye, then?” Thom replied.
“Mmm. Without the likes of you.”
“And a pleasant journey to you.”
“Just those of us who are romantically independent, you see,” she explained.
“I may soon have a right to join ye,” Thom said. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Have you done wrong, then?” Annie asked.
“Or too much right, perhaps,” he answered.
“You’re a fool if you have,” Annie accused him.
“So certain that I’m to blame!”
“You’re such a lad,” she said, disgustedly. She was smoking her cigarette fiercely, wincing against the smoke that she herself cast up.
Thom recognized a man coming down the stairs. “Did Henry invite that wanker?”
“Who?” Annie asked, swiveling to look. “Hans? Must have done.”
“They’re friends, I guess,” Jacob offered, because he was afraid that Thom was upset for his sake.
Just as Hans reached them, Henry arrived with four glasses, pressed against one another like cells in a honeycomb. “I should have known to buy a spare,” he apologized.
“Not at all. I shall—,” Hans began.
But he was interrupted by the advent of Melinda, who appeared behind him, striding across the long room eagerly, her sharp cheekbones pink from her quick transition out of the brisk night into the windowless heat of the cellar. “Darlings,” she saluted them. “What a relief. I was sure I had come down the wrong rabbit hole. I had no notion it had become so ropey here. Those vixens on the stairs—bloody hell…” She drew from her purse with one hand her cigarettes, lighter, and wallet, her fingers splayed separately open, at all angles like the blades of a Swiss army knife. “Does anyone else need a drink?” she asked.
“Allow me,” said Hans. He refused the crowns that she was unfolding and, turning unexpectedly to Jacob, said, “I heard that you…that a friend of yours was lost to you. I was very sorry.”
“Oh, it’s all right, thank you,” Jacob said, awkwardly. Seated securely among his friends, he had an uncharitable impression of Hans as a pudgy child who hoped the other children on the street would let him play with them.
Hans gave a slight bow and left them for the bar.
“That was decent of him,” said Melinda.
“Is Carl coming?” he asked, softly.
“I was going to ask you.”
“Say, have I shown you Sarah’s photos?” Henry asked, producing a blue air mail envelope.
“What are they of?” Jacob asked.
“My daughter’s birthday. Mel and Rafe found me a tricycle to send her.”
“Rafe heard of a shipment coming into ,” Melinda explained.
She let the photos slip out of the envelope and held them by the edges. The little blond girl with Henry’s wide eyes was sitting in a green garden under a canopy of pink crepe paper streamers.
Henry spoke shyly. “She looks pleased in the photos.”
“Oh she does,” Melinda assured him.
“This is Barcelona?” Thom asked, taking the photos one by one from Annie, who was taking them from Melinda.
“It’s her fourth birthday.” Henry’s eyes remained on the pictures.
“She’s a beautiful child, isn’t she,” Annie admired.
“With that Czechoslovak tricycle she’ll be the envy of all the Barcelona youth,” said Thom.
“It’s a Polish tricycle, actually.”
“Will you be getting a Polish tricycle, too, then Annie?” Thom asked.
“I may do,” she replied. “All sorts of good things in Poland.”
Hans returned and, with his feet, pulled out a chair opposite Melinda and Jacob. As he set down the beers that he had brought, Melinda drew back with the photos she still had, as if they were cards and she were afraid of revealing her hand.
“Pictures of Henry’s child,” she then said to Hans, by way of explanation.
“Ah, your scattered seed,” he said. When no one laughed, he added, “Cheers,” hurriedly, and sipped his beer.
“Cheers,” Melinda answered, since she was closest, but she didn’t touch her beer.
“What a thing to say,” Annie muttered.
Hans either didn’t hear Annie or pretended not to.
Annie turned to Jacob. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, have you ever heard this notion: life is an infection of matter, and spirit is an infection of life? Is that a thing that people think?”
“I’ve never heard it before.”
“Is that from your Thomas Mann?” Melinda asked.
“I find it rather a peculiar idea,” Annie admitted. “Even to me it didn’t quite sound like proper biology.”
“An old poofter, wasn’t he,” Thom commented.
“Do you think that comes into it?” Annie asked.
“It’s part of a larger idea about death, I seem to vaguely recall,” said Melinda.
“A cheerful sod,” said Thom. “You tell me such things from that book, I don’t know why you choose to read it.”
“Oh, I find I get quite lost in it,” Annie replied, with some enthusiasm. “Nothing whatever happens for pages and pages, and one doesn’t mind somehow. It’s rather like the , actually.” There was a sudden brightness and openness in her looks, and even Henry, who had gathered up his photos and was storing them away, looked up to admire her.
“The ?” Melinda asked.
“I find. With each of us in our little rooms, like. And we have balconies.”
“I hope you don’t slip into one another’s rooms across the balconies…,” Melinda suggested.
“Nothing like that.” Annie was brought up short by Melinda’s teasing. Then, on second thought, she smiled at the suggestion, it was so unlikely. “Gah, no, not at the . The balconies are rather high, for one thing. Twenty-six stories…
“It was a friend in Berlin gave me the Mann,” she volunteered to Jacob. “When you and I were there.”
“I don’t remember your getting a book.”
“I didn’t think at the time that I was going to read it.”
They were nearing the end of their first round, which they always drank more quickly than those that followed, and which they hardly felt except in the way one feels the looseness in a boat that has been untied from its mooring but has not yet left it. A silence fell over them, a part of the rhythm of their conversation, and Jacob watched Annie absentmindedly tug the long sleeves of her sweater up around her fists, leaving out only a fork of two fingers to hold her cigarette. At the bar, a couple of Czech boys were half dancing to the almost inaudible punk rock, in the convulsive, somewhat self-parodying style app
ropriate to the genre. The dancing boys’ bangs shook and tossed, obscuring their eyes. Perhaps there were good things in Krakow, Jacob thought. In any case Annie was right to want to make the most of their time here, which was never going to come back.
“Carl!” Henry cried out.
On the other side of the gray-yellow room, Carl shot up one of his hands in recognition.
“I have you and you and you,” Carl said, when he reached them. “I don’t have you and I don’t have you.”
“Have us how?” asked Hans, the last person indicated by Carl.
“As photographic subjects.”
“I don’t much fancy pictures of myself, you know,” said Annie.
“That’s silly.”
“It isn’t silly.” She wouldn’t allow even her self-deprecation to be dismissed.
“There may not be enough light.” Carl raised his little steel rangefinder to his face and squinted shut the eye it left free. “There’s not, unless you don’t move. Unless you don’t so much as quiver.”
Annie froze cooperatively. “Well, go on.”
“It won’t let me take an exposure.”
She held herself in place a moment longer, anyway, her back arching slightly, her mouth neutral. Then he did manage to take a picture.
“Down and out in Prague and Krakow,” Carl captioned.
“Do you really think so?”
“He doesn’t think so,” Melinda said, raising her eyes from the table for the first time since Carl’s arrival.
“I mean the ambience.” His eyes drifted to Melinda’s, but he and she were careful not to look at the same time.
“I need Jana, too,” Carl said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Thom offered, “but tonight I make no promises.”
“I don’t want promises. I want results. Speaking of which, I also want a beer. Anyone?”
The call for another round became general. Jacob rose to offer funds and carriage, and as he walked with Carl to the bar, his feet placing themselves in a path without his conscious design, he noticed that he was no longer standing apart from the room; he was no longer holding himself separate from his experience of it. He had become a part of its pattern, together with his friends, or perhaps it was the case that he and his friends had imposed a pattern of their own upon the establishment, or at least upon the corner of it that they had taken. He wondered if this feeling was what had come to take the place of what he had once been seeking. The feeling that they were exceptional together. It was their being together that was exceptional, rather than anything any of them did or might do. It wasn’t necessary for anyone outside their group to recognize it; they were in that way independent.
He knew that the feeling wasn’t rational. He didn’t care. He was going to believe in it anyway. He carried drinks to the table and he returned to the bar, where Carl was paying, in order to explain it to him. He knew Carl wouldn’t need to be persuaded. He knew Carl also felt it. He just wanted the pleasure of trying to articulate it to him. He wanted to say that they had all become somehow permanent to one another, that Carl was right—leaving didn’t matter, leaving wasn’t going to change the relation that they were all in with one another. Even Rafe and Kaspar, who weren’t here tonight. The connection was going to outlast the time that they were going to share, and somehow they felt the afterlife of it now, while they were still together, almost as a physical thing, casting a retrospective aura, which they felt prospectively. And it was terribly sad, as it turned out, and something else, too—exhilarating, somehow, maybe because they hadn’t lost one another quite yet—and he wouldn’t even be trying to talk about it if he weren’t drunk. They had become the world to one another, both those who had fallen in love and those who hadn’t.
“Is that what I’m feeling?” Carl interrupted.
“Is what what you’re feeling?”
“The future?”
Henry unbent himself from the table and came toward them. “What are the two of you conspiring?”
“Phenomenology,” Carl told him, as usual somewhere between joking and not joking.
“Of?”
“That’s harder to say.”
“Often the case with phenomenology.”
The straight men would turn it into mere thinking if Jacob let it get away from him. “I was trying to describe the feeling that you have when you want to keep someone with you,” Jacob said.
“The feeling of wanting to stay with the one story,” Henry glossed.
“Yes.”
“I understood the three of us to be partisans of the other story,” Henry countered.
“Are we?” Jacob asked.
“We’re fellow rogues,” Henry said.
“Rogues!” Carl echoed, appreciating the return of the word.
“To roguery!” Henry toasted. “And rodgery.”
“To rodgery, anyway,” Carl repeated, clinking his glass. “That’s a terrible pun.”
In the silences that naturally punctuated their conversations, Jacob sometimes found that he noticed Carl’s presence in a way that he didn’t when they were exchanging words, as if Carl’s presence were lying under water by the side of their boat, like a man enchanted in a fairy tale, and became easier to see when they stopped rowing and the surface of the water went still. He noticed it now, not in any single detail—not in his beard or his eyes—but in the quality of his whole person and in its reality. It embarrassed Jacob to become aware of the fact and process of his observation, and he wondered if he was staring and embarrassing Carl. He saw, however, that Henry was looking at Carl just as fondly. Melinda was right; they were all taken with him.
“But even you must feel it sometimes,” Carl accused Henry, resuming their talk. “In fact I know you do.”
“Feel what?” Henry asked.
“The one-story feeling.”
“Maybe.”
“The way you miss Frieda,” Carl pressed him.
Jacob was puzzled.
“My daughter,” Henry explained. “It’s different,” he continued.
“Of course,” Carl said. “I have no idea.”
“Well,” said Henry, tilting his head.
“Okay, true,” Carl replied to what hadn’t been spoken.
Henry looked away, and when he turned back to them, he caught Jacob’s eye for a second, as if he were trying to measure the distance between the two of them, or to estimate how much Jacob had understood of his near-wordless exchange with Carl. Then he hid himself by taking a deep drink from his beer.
Melinda rose from the bench in the corner. As she approached the three of them across the empty center of the room, she fell into a comic swagger, a dame in a bar, play-acting so as to channel the attention that her beauty drew to her. “Has one of you blokes got a light?”
The straight men let Jacob come up with it. “Sure.”
“‘Sure, podner.’”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Taking pleasure in the sound of your voice, rather. You say it so sweetly. Like an amiable cowboy.” The straight men, during this banter, withdrew into private conversation.
“I’ll rustle up your dogies if you aren’t careful.”
“Would you. No one else bloody will.”
“Is Rafe coming tonight?”
“I’m a single girl tonight, and shall remain so.”
Jacob sensed that she, like Henry, was hiding. She was standing next to Jacob so as to stand close to Carl, but she didn’t want to engage Carl, didn’t necessarily even want to oblige him to notice her. She made no gestures, struck no poses. It was more evident than usual how delicate she was, how slender and fine.
“It is funny about Krakow,” she murmured. “My mind’s quite made up about America. You know, about your mate going there for good and all. But somehow Krakow…”
“He’s coming back from Krakow.”
“Yes, it seems so unnecessary.” She held Jacob with her eyes for a moment, as if she wanted him to take care not to glance in the
direction of the person they were talking about. He felt the secret that they were sharing encircle and then isolate them. “He asked again what is to be my project, you know,” she continued. “What is to be my story.”
“What did you say?”
She hesitated. It was the same hesitation that she must have given to Carl when he had asked the question. She was repeating it; her mind was running again down the paths it had taken then in search of an answer, and failing again to find one, or anyway to find one that she was willing to speak aloud. “We had a terrible row. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No.”
“I said he oughtn’t to make it harder than it has to be.” She made an effort at laughing. “And that’s what we’ve agreed to. Not to make it harder.”
“That seems civilized.”
“I don’t know what he does with his days now.”
“I thought he was still taking walks with you.”
She shook her head. “It’s just as well, really.” She excused herself.
Jacob watched her cross the room again and slip behind the table into a seat next to Annie, who meanwhile swanned forward her neck so that her face tilted back and her red-blond hair fell clear and she could safely touch her cigarette to Melinda’s for a light. There was something Melinda had needed to realize about herself, Jacob decided, something she had had to learn from Carl, or from the attraction that drew her to him, and having learned it, she was able now to let him go. Is that what Kaspar meant? The way one becomes willing to leave behind a notebook after a class is finished, though a mild attachment may linger because of the effort that went into taking the notes. Whereas if she had gone to bed with Carl, she would never have learned this thing, according to Kaspar’s theory, and would never have become willing to give him up. What a cold way of looking at it. The coldness was an objection that Jacob would have to put to Kaspar. And what was the thing that she had learned? It made Jacob selfishly happy to think that they were going to get to keep Melinda now. Melinda wouldn’t get to keep Carl, of course. None of them could. And come to think of it, Melinda herself might now have to go east with Rafe, and then they wouldn’t get to keep her, either. In that case, what did he mean by thinking they could “keep” her? Perhaps he meant that they would somehow be able now to keep her in memory as she had been—that there was an idea of her that they wouldn’t have to give up. That was cold, too. What was this idea of her?