by Caleb Crain
—They say some girl on drugs thought it up, Milo continued. —She had, they say, instructions. But we all thought there had been a death.
—So there was no Palach this time, said Jacob.
—Palach? No, that was the Prague Spring.
—I mean, no one had to die this time, in order for there to be a revolution. There didn’t have to be a sacrifice.
—Well, that could be. I no longer remember what this one’s name was, the one who wasn’t dead.
Carl would appreciate the postmodern touch of a fiction in the middle of the history. Jacob would have to write to him about it. To bring themselves to the point of revolt, the Czechs and Slovaks had needed to feel sorrow and indignation, and their desire had summoned into the world a story that could focus those feelings. Of course the story would have had to come through a person whose attachment to reality was troubled—someone like an addict, whose need was more than she could stand and would tell any story to hold attention. It was better, in the end, that it had come about through a lie than through a death. Jacob wondered if the lie had been helped along, maybe by somebody Rafe knew. It would probably have been pretty easy for an American to fool the Czechs, because Americans were so trusted by them. For now they were, anyway. And for a little while longer. The question was whether one could ever use a story while seeing through it—whether one could know the truth in the moment and still do what one needed to do in order to free oneself.
Milo sidled up to one of the narrow windows and peered down at the square below, keeping himself on the near side of the stark prism of light that fell through the window, so that the light silhouetted him. He seemed to have been made bashful by something, but Jacob didn’t know whether it was by his role as the taker of some of the exhibit’s photographs or by his memory of participation in the events, which even now made grand claims for themselves. There was something solemn about the numbers of people in the photographs that followed, still impressive no matter how many times Jacob had seen photographs like them before: hundreds of thousands had gathered in Wenceslas Square in the days following the police brutality, and then even more, a few days later, in the fields behind the empty pedestal of Stalin’s monument, standing for hours in the cold listening to speeches by people offering to be their new leaders, offering to take them into a new world. Looking at the seas of faces, Jacob wondered if it was the emotions of so many people that caused the political changes or the other way around. Were the quantities of feeling released necessary to change, or were they a side effect of it? The people looked content to be where they were, yet “aroused,” as Milo put it. Jacob’s old, confused longing to take part in the lost moment in the pictures came over him again—the longing to belong to the moment, to have been alive in it. The odd thing was that he had hated to be part of any group in America. Maybe he had never been in a group large enough—a group so large that he could approach vanishing in it, which was a kind of freedom—or maybe he had never been in a group devoted to freedom itself.
—Father wanted last night, for me to tell you, that we can sleep at our house sometimes if we want. It isn’t necessary always to sleep at yours.
Jacob realized that he was looking at one of Milo’s photos: it showed a middle-aged man in a trilby and a tweed overcoat who had climbed a tree in Wenceslas Square for a better view. The man’s hands were folded, a tricolor swatch was pinned neatly to his lapel, and he was watching and listening with a placid expression. Visible through the bare branches of his tree was a poster, affixed to a lamppost, celebrating the eighteenth congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In the center of the poster there was a bold outline of the Party’s characteristic star. —What does that mean, your father’s message? Jacob asked.
—Just that, I think, Milo said, speaking softly, but not so low that he would seem to be hiding their conversation from the ticket seller. —If ever it’s more practical for us to be in Strašnice than Žižkov.
—That is kindhearted of him, said Jacob.
—He’s like that. He’s courteous.
—But he doesn’t know.
Milo shrugged. —He invites you, as a friend of mine.
—I don’t know, if I can, admitted Jacob.
—I know, said Milo. —If you were staying, maybe one day it would in fact have been more practical for some reason to stay there. Accidentally more practical.
One of the photos was awry, and Milo absentmindedly adjusted it.
—Your photos are great, Jacob said.
—But no.
—Yes. They’re witty, and that isn’t common in photos.
—You ox.
If Jacob had been forced to explain, he might have said that he was declining out of a sense of proportion. To accept would have started a new story that he didn’t have time to finish.
—Don’t you want to continue as a photographer? Jacob asked. —As for a career?
—What would I photograph? We no longer have a revolution.
—I don’t know. There’s a war in Bosnia.
—I’m fond of my skin.
—Then elsewhere.
—Someday I will, maybe, he said, and shrugged again. —There’s an old song about the time, when Czechs had to serve in the Austrian army. ‘I’ll no longer fight to conquer Herzegovina.’
Za Pána, a jeho rodinu,
Já už nechci vybojovat Hercegovinu
Milo half whispered, half sang. The song had a waltz rhythm, and it was a little melancholy. The ticket seller looked over at them and smiled awkwardly, uncertain whether she was supposed to have taken notice.
* * *
As Kaspar had hinted, it was a little difficult to get hold of Rafe, but Jacob felt that he ought to make an effort to say good-bye to him. It was after all Jacob’s idea now that the risk of a love’s ending—the inevitability of it, really—was something an adult had to accept, and if Jacob were consciously to keep away from Rafe, he would be giving in to a less rigorous conception, an idea of love as a struggle that it was possible to win if one chose the right side. It wasn’t possible to win; one had to side with the idea that love couldn’t always be held onto.
“You want to see me?” Rafe asked, from the doorway of his Havelská apartment building, when on the fourth or fifth try Jacob at last found him at home one evening. “What an honor.” Instead of inviting Jacob upstairs, he arranged on the spot for them to meet the next afternoon in a café on .
The café was located in the piano nobile of an eighteenth-century palace that had recently been restored to the family from whom the Communists had nationalized it. The Communists must have appreciated the beauty of the rooms, because they had left intact the height of the ceilings and the generosity of the windows. The walls were now painted a delicate shade of lime, with white trim; in the windows were boxes of daisies.
The café was one of the new, fully private enterprises. The d’ was reluctant to let Jacob wander among the tables in search of Rafe; he understood it to be within his authority to escort Jacob to a table of his—the d’s—choosing. He trailed Jacob skeptically; only after Rafe had accepted Jacob’s presence with a welcoming nod did he retreat. Moments later, a waiter brought Jacob a menu, unprompted.
“It’s awfully professional here,” said Jacob, admiring the menu, which wasn’t a mimeograph.
“Isn’t it great?” Rafe replied.
Jacob studied the menu; he was wary of meeting Rafe’s eye, though Rafe seemed at ease—composed, beneath a surface animation.
“So what can I do for you?” Rafe asked, as soon as Jacob had ordered an espresso.
“I’m leaving next week.”
“Back to the home front, eh.”
It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, and only a fraction of the tables were occupied. At one of them sat three businessmen in Western suits and ties, their table cluttered with American-style memo pads and thick pens. Most of the other patrons were young people, writing postcards alone or chatting in small groups. Their chee
ks were sunburnt, and they had tucked their unwashed hair under bandannas. Tall nylon backpacks sagged on the floor beside their chairs.
“They’re ruining the city, aren’t they,” remarked Rafe. “The backpackers. Though I suppose it’s hypocritical of me to regret the Americanization.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed. I can’t tell sometimes, Jacob—are you really or do you put it on?”
“I think I really am.”
“You almost convince me.”
“I try to be polite,” Jacob said.
“Oh, that’s different. That could be quite dangerous even,” he said with approval. “Have you seen Kaspar lately? Did he tell you how Goethe murdered Schiller? He’s figured it out.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“Because, who wrote Faust? It couldn’t have been Goethe, who never had a dramatic idea in his life. Schiller wrote it, Kaspar says, and then the devil convinced Goethe to murder him and steal his manuscript. So a little bit of it is by Goethe, actually. The part about being tempted to kill Schiller. He’s made a list of parallel passages.”
“He said he hadn’t seen so much of you lately.”
“This was about a month ago. Maybe he’s moved on. Heard from Melinda? Does she write to you?”
“Not much, but she doesn’t have as much reason to write to me as she does to you.”
“And she doesn’t have as much reason not to write to you as she does to me.”
“She wrote me once,” Jacob admitted.
“And me once, too. She must be going down her list.”
Rafe noticed that his own teacup was empty and tried to pour himself more, but he was out. He summoned a waiter and lifted the lid of his pot to ask for a refill of hot water. There was a trace of impatience in his manner, a hint that it might be considered gracious of him not to mind having to ask. No one would have dared reveal impatience to a waiter in the fall, before the latest changes. It was like Rafe to have discovered that one could now take such a liberty.
“What are you going to do in America, tell me again?” Rafe asked.
“I’m going to school.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“The life of the mind,” Rafe conjectured.
“I guess.”
“I wonder if it’ll be enough for you. You’ve learned a lot here. Not everyone picks up Czech.”
“I only picked up a little . I was dating Czechs and I had to be able to get by.”
“But that’s something, too. I bet you learned a lot about that, and I bet it’s not like it is in America. This’ll interest you, I think. I had a friend, another ‘Harv,’ as Annie calls us, who interviewed with the ‘State Department’ around the time we were graduating, which is what they tell you to say when you’re interviewing for one of the intelligence agencies, as you probably know. They gave him these puzzles to solve, sort of like the kind that the consulting firms give at their interviews. They told him, for instance, to imagine you’re with an ‘asset,’ someone you hope will bring in information. Imagine you’re with an asset who’s gay. He’s nervous. He’s suspicious. What do you say to put him at ease?”
“You mean, what do you say because he’s gay?” Jacob considered. “That’s a tricky one.”
“Isn’t it? Because if you say you’re gay, and he makes a pass at you, what then? Even if you really are gay, you might not want to go to bed with him.”
“You could say you’re a tolerant person.”
“And that would be highly laudable in you, but a bit abstract, don’t you think? Everyone likes to say they’re tolerant.”
“I give up.”
“My friend didn’t get it, either,” said Rafe. His hot water had come and the old leaves were steeping; he fussed with the pot to give Jacob time for one more chance. “Come on.”
“No idea.”
“You say you have a gay brother,” Rafe revealed, pouring himself a new cup.
“Oh, that’s good,” Jacob admitted. “Because then he thinks you’re an ally, but there’s no possibility of romantic trouble.”
“Isn’t it good?”
“Too bad I couldn’t figure it out.”
“I imagine you’re usually pretty good at puzzles, though. At thinking about people. There’s almost always a story that people are telling about themselves, and sometimes you can get them to tell it ever so slightly differently.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Don’t be bashful. I’m just saying, what if you’re bored? At this school. What if you’re of my party without knowing it?”
“Which party is that?”
Rafe grinned for an answer.
“Goethe’s or Schiller’s?” Jacob asked. “You could have told me that you had a gay brother,” Jacob ventured.
“But I don’t need to win your trust. After all we’ve been through. Or do I, still? Is that what you’re saying? That’s not very nice, if so. But then I might answer that it wouldn’t be a matter of urgency for me because you don’t really know anything. Not anything strategic.”
“I really don’t,” Jacob said carefully.
“See?” Rafe met his gaze. “You say that with such conviction. That’s why I say you could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous to whom?”
“You tell me,” Rafe challenged him. “To the Schillers of the world?”
“Wasn’t it Schiller who explained the difference between and conscious art?”
“To the Goethes, then. Who can be even trickier. See, I think you’re more like me, and that you’d find that even what my friend went out for was too tiresome for you. You wouldn’t like the having-an-allegiance part of it.”
“Did your friend get in?”
“He said he didn’t, but I imagine they tell them to say that, too.”
“So you don’t have an allegiance yourself.”
“Do I seem to? I don’t think I’m the sort who really has a home team.”
“Kaspar said something like that about you.”
Rafe sipped his tea. “I think Kaspar and I understand each other, finally.”
* * *
Leaving requires work. There were a few more books that he meant to buy. He had to sort his clothes into those worth bringing home and those that it made more sense to leave behind. He decided that his fireproof red blanket should stay but that his Russian-made windup alarm clock could come home with him. He left Václav’s empty cage on the sidewalk one morning, and it was gone by the time he returned from teaching in the afternoon. Chores distracted him from such maudlin trains of thought as wondering whether he was likely to recognize in the moment the last time that he and Milo went to bed together.
In Paris, it would be convenient to have a student ID card, and he raised the subject with Henry, who worked after all at the Czechoslovak government’s office for foreign students. Henry invited him to drop by his office some morning. He could issue Jacob a card, and they could have lunch afterward.
Annie helped Jacob buy a scarf for Jacob’s mother one afternoon, and they ended up at the foot of Wenceslas Square, listening to the four Czech teenagers who sang early Beatles songs under the English-language name the Dogs. The Dogs were surrounded by a ring of young trampové, native and foreign. Cheery and dated, the songs corresponded to a popular idea of the revolution as an outburst that had been meant to happen at the end of the 1960s and had somehow been preserved from staling or souring.
“They’re not bad,” said Annie. They were standing at a slight remove from the Dogs’ admirers.
“It’s funny that people come halfway around the world to hear songs they already know.”
“Everything needn’t always be improving.”
“I didn’t say it was wrong to like it.”
“But you think it’s simple.” The song ended; there was a clatter of applause. “It’s a pity you can’t stay longer,” she added, before the young people began to sing again.
“I can
’t.”
“I didn’t say I thought you could. There are things you mean to do.”
He was silenced by her flattery, if it was flattery. He believed in his ability to turn away from things. It had served him in the past, and it had become associated in his mind with the indifference to outcome that he had decided was the best way to approach a love affair. He even felt a little sorry for Annie on account of the strength of her attachments—her inability to turn away—though he knew it was ugly of him.
To shift the topic of conversation, he told her that Henry was going to make him an ID. She wondered why none of them had thought to ask for one before, and it occurred to her that she ought to ask for one as well.
That night, at the , she persuaded Thom to come along and ask for one, too.
By this chain of events, rather than through any sentimental planning, Jacob found himself having lunch in Josefov with his closest friends a few days before leaving. The meal began awkwardly, because Henry had balked when they had showed up in the lobby of his building. In a formal voice, he had asked them for documentation, and Annie had been taken aback. “But you know I haven’t got any,” she had objected. Thom had begged off, assuring Henry that he hadn’t meant to put him to any trouble. Jacob, however, had brazened it out. He had brought with him a letter from the school that he was going to attend, which constituted if not proof—he was not a student there yet—then a sufficient cover. In the lobby, after Henry had vanished back upstairs to type up Jacob’s card, Annie stewed. “I suppose after all I’m not going to poxy Paris.” It took a quarter of an hour for Henry to make the laminated card.
They walked down the block to a restaurant where Henry and Carl used to eat, recognizable to Jacob from a photo that Carl had taken there. A large window opened the dining room to the street. From a stone wall, an oversize oil portrait of one of Czechoslovakia’s last Communist leaders, a bland and corpulent face, ironically presided. When they chose a table—they took the corner of a communal one—Annie was still letting Henry have it.
“I had no notion of you as such an upholder of the laws,” she said.