by Caleb Crain
“They pay me to be.”
“It’s quite responsible of you.”
“He does work for the government,” Thom said. “He has to keep a clean backside.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” A few wisps of her peach-red hair fell across her face as she looked down to study the menu, but rather than smooth them away she merely looked steadily through them. Henry was sitting beside her, and it was easy for the two of them, facing the same direction, not to meet each other’s gaze.
“He has to be something of a politician, I suspect,” Thom continued. When Annie didn’t reply or look up, he added, “But come the revolution, eh, Annie?”
“Oh, if it’s for the revolution that you want it…,” Henry suggested.
“Now he sings a different tune,” said Thom.
“For the revolution but not for his friends,” Annie observed.
“He did make a card for Jacob.”
“His papers are all nicely in order, aren’t they,” she replied.
No one had an answer.
“If it’s very important to you…,” Henry began, after a pause.
“Oh no, I don’t much care, really. I’m merely noticing. I had you figured as more of a free spirit, as it were. That’s all. But perhaps I’m the only free spirit left—the only one who isn’t fecking off to do something sensible with his life. Among the lot of you, at any rate.”
“Henry and I are staying, aren’t we,” said Thom. “For a while more, anyway.”
A waiter came and took their orders.
The rhythm of what happened in restaurants now passed without any special observation by Jacob. The strangeness had gone out of this world; he had got used to it here. If it was strangeness that he was after, he was going to have to look elsewhere, the way Rafe was going to.
“Have you got any fags?” Annie asked Thom, once the waiter had left.
“I haven’t. It’s against the rules now.”
“What’s this?” Henry asked.
“Every morning I put the crowns that I would otherwise spend on them into a bowl in the kitchen. As a fund for the young Tomáš that is to be—for his nappies and such. I’ve saved quite a sum. Sparty don’t come free, you know.”
“They’re quite dear,” Annie agreed.
They complimented Thom on his willpower.
“It will all be more difficult now, won’t it,” Annie generalized. “Everything will take more strength.”
“Will it be as bad as all that?” Thom asked.
She nodded a few times, as if encouraging herself. “It’s better to face up to it.”
“It will be a shame to say good-bye, won’t it,” Thom admitted.
As the next to leave, Jacob didn’t know what to say. Henry, too, was silent. Jacob had claimed in the writing group that stories that resisted being stories weren’t to his taste, but his own search had brought him to a position not unlike Henry’s, or what he imagined Henry’s to be. He was playing the rogue consciously now. It was a different place in the story than he was used to looking from. He wasn’t sure he could see everything—everything, at any rate, that he was used to being able to see. He wasn’t sure he knew where to look in order to see it.
Their food came. “If we’re free spirits,” he risked, “we have to be free to leave, don’t we?”
“Och, your theory again,” Annie said. “Must you leave in order to prove it?”
According to his policy of insouciance, he didn’t let himself think about losses, except for a vague awareness of a sort of clearing that his departure was going to make in his life.
“Are we to meet your friend ever?” she wondered.
“I don’t know.”
Thom broke in: “As it happens I’m under instructions from Jana to invite him and the lot of you to that immodest swimming hole this weekend. The one she was on about the other night.”
“I thought you weren’t to be allowed to go,” said Henry.
“She’s consented to take me after all, though she prefers to remain decent herself, given her condition, on the understanding that her restraint isn’t to hinder the rest of us.”
“I’m game,” said Henry.
“I wasn’t expecting anything so bold of you,” Annie told Thom.
“Did you think me a shrinking violet?”
“It isn’t that, exactly.”
“There aren’t many in Prague with ginger hair like Thom’s,” said Henry. “It might be said that he has a sort of duty.”
“I suppose it does come with a certain responsibility.”
“What does?” asked Annie.
“The magnificence of my person.”
“Gah.”
“There are the Czech women who use henna,” Jacob suggested.
“Do you think they use it down there as well?” Thom asked. “That would be a sight.”
“And you’ll bring your man, if we go?” Annie asked Jacob.
“I think he’d be up for it.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
“Are you suggesting that the sight of myself alone would not be a sufficient draw?” Thom asked.
“You can be such a git.”
* * *
Jacob’s last lesson was with Milena’s children. On the bus, he noticed a tickle in the back of his throat. Was he getting sick again? He didn’t have time to. He sat still and closed his eyes to preserve his energy. The long, boxy bus seemed to try to curve with the hills as it mounted them. The engine whined with strain on the upward slopes, and he felt himself sway with inertia against the vehicle’s turnings.
He found the lindens on the family’s street heavy with dark, wavering leaves, offering themselves to the late-afternoon sun like so many opened hands. On the vine that climbed the wall in front of the family’s house, the leaves were also broad and plentiful. Looking up into them, as a breeze riffled them and as he waited for an answer to his ring, he saw hidden there, as if he were looking up the leg of a man’s shorts, a constellation: unripe pearls of fruit, small, pale, and tight. When the breeze dropped, the leaves covering the fruit also subsided, but having seen one cluster, he was now able to see others peeping from under drapery elsewhere in the vine.
In greeting Jacob, Prokop and Anežka were noisy with pleasure. When Jacob asked their mother for a pain reliever, he explained that his throat hurt. He didn’t want her to think that he minded the children’s loud cries.
—May I? she asked, and pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. —The color isn’t good, she said of his complexion. She shifted her gaze to the side and to the floor, nervous about having taken the liberties of touching him and looking at him closely.
—A Paralen will be enough for me, he said.
She hurried to fetch the medicine. He didn’t like it that her worry about him was so marked. Even now, in their last session, he was still hoping to give a more professional cast to the relationship between them—to hold himself at a certain distance from her. Prokop and Anežka, hushed by the mention of illness, observed Jacob without any apparent expectation that he would speak to them before he had been ministered to. No other children from the neighborhood seemed to have come. Maybe their parents hadn’t seen the point of paying for education that would have no sequel.
—I’ll cook something for you, Milena said, when she returned with a box of pills and a glass of water. —I’ll cook you a Jewish soup. Do you know it? Wait, wait, she said, as she moved toward the kitchen.
—I don’t need, he called after her.
—Garlic, lemon, and honey. It will cure you.
—We’re starting the lesson, Jacob said.
—Wait, wait, she told him again. When she saw that he wouldn’t, she put her head down, continued into the kitchen, and struck a match to light a burner, as if to prove that she could be as stubborn as he could.
At his usual seat at the dining room table, Jacob began to clap his hands. Prokop studied this not-quite-adult behavior with embarrassment and admiration, but Anež
ka squirmed out of her chair, unconsciously covering her ears to shut out the sharp sound that he was making.
“Anežka, where are you going?” he asked in English.
She hesitated. She looked toward the kitchen.
“I can clap more softly,” he offered, as he did so. “Why don’t you sit down,” he suggested, nodding at her seat, as he continued to clap. Here he was, prematurely using a command that he had been hoping to teach, he reproached himself. He knew Anežka couldn’t understand his words, but he thought she could follow his body language and he didn’t want to capitulate and speak Czech so early in the lesson.
“Moment,” the girl finally replied. She darted off to find her mother.
Jacob stopped clapping while he tried to figure out how to react. Prokop meanwhile took the clapping up, as if to signal that he was willing to play Jacob’s game, whatever it was, whether his sister played or not.
“Wait a minute.” Jacob held up a hand, and the boy stopped. To compensate himself for his disappointment, the boy began kicking a leg of Jacob’s chair.
Through the kitchen door, Jacob saw Milena bend down to accept a whispered confidence from her daughter. After a conference in lowered voices, the woman and the girl walked slowly back into the central room together, with a certain ceremoniousness, Anežka leaning shyly against her mother’s side, one of Milena’s arms sheltering her daughter’s head and shoulders like a bird’s wing.
“Please, I am sorry. Anežka make pudink. Do you know, pudink?”
“Pudding.”
“For you,” Milena continued. “Please, will you eat? She has fear, that you will not want.” Milena paused, at the edge of her capacity in English, and watched Jacob searchingly. —It isn’t necessary to eat the Jewish soup, she continued, in Czech. —But if you have a taste for pudding, it is your last day, and Anežka hoped…
“Of course,” replied Jacob. “I’ll eat the pudding right after I eat the Jewish soup.”
“Thank you, thank you.”
Anežka’s face relaxed into smiles as Milena translated his words. It was awful that he had nearly hurt the girl’s feelings because of an arbitrary wish to be more impersonal as a teacher. She was a child; children can’t help but care about the people they’re with. For that matter maybe it had been a little cruel of him to wish to be more impersonal with Milena.
“Five minute, soup, I bring,” Milena said. “Please, teach,” she added, by gesture throwing her children once more onto Jacob’s hands.
It took an effort of will to clap loudly again, because Jacob now felt abashed by how cruel he had been, and a quantum of something like cruelty is needed when making a loud noise. But Anežka was merry with restored confidence and Prokop was pleased by the resumption of the game, and soon Jacob was able to fall in with their high spirits. He taught them how to command each other to clap and to stop clapping, to wave and to stop waving, to smile and to stop smiling. The soup, when Milena brought it, proved to be a sort of tisane, clear and bittersweet. Its heat soothed him. Anežka monitored him closely as he drank, and as soon as he took his last sip—at the moment he clinked his cup down into his saucer—she hopped up and ran to her mother, calling, as she ran, for the distribution of her pudding.
Milena brought three small blue bowls out on a steel tray. It was a sweet, chilled custard, the color of good butter.
—You aren’t giving yourself any? Jacob asked.
—With husband, later, Milena explained, though she sat down at the table to share their enjoyment.
—It’s very good, Jacob complimented Anežka after his first spoonful.
—But what’s good is at the bottom, she protested. —You have to mine for the good part.
There was a compote under the custard.
—Gooseberry and cherry, Milena informed Jacob.
—Did you cook it yourself? Jacob asked Anežka.
—With Maminka.
—It’s sublime, Jacob said. —Thank you.
—Sublime, Anežka repeated to her mother.
—He thanked you, Anežka, Milena prompted.
—You’re welcome, she told Jacob, in a singsong voice.
After Milena cleared the dishes away, Jacob took from his backpack a photo of a lion, which he had cut out of a magazine advertisement. Introducing the animal as Simon, Jacob explained that the children were only to obey the commands that Simon said, not those that Jacob issued on his own authority. After a few repetitions of this rule, a few samples of commands said by Simon and commands not said by him, and at last a gloss in Czech, the children understood, and they played Simon Says with him for the next half hour, taking turns according to the rule that whoever failed to know when to obey became the next issuer of commands. From time to time Jacob introduced new vocabulary by acting out its meaning; from time to time the children asked him for vocabulary that they themselves wanted to introduce. At last, in their familiar pattern, the children began to grow a little wild, rebelling against the burden placed on their attention, and their mother, drawn by their outbursts, which she felt a responsibility to suppress, became too much the focus of the children’s attention for the game to continue, and Jacob had to surrender the lesson.
“Please, if I may,” Milena said. “I have for you a gift.” She was holding it behind her back.
Jacob, stowing his props away in his backpack, stopped himself from saying that he didn’t need one.
“It is for memory,” she continued.
As she opened her fist, he knew he would leave the gift behind, unpacked, in his apartment. It was a figurine of Christ, made of ivory-colored plastic, like a chess piece. It wasn’t a crucifix; the god was merely raising his hands above his head in benediction, a pose that prompted in Jacob a pagan analogy to the extended arms of a flying superhero. An American child would be tempted to zoom the figurine around the room. Prokop and Anežka, though, were observing quietly, respectful of the solemnity with which their mother had invested the object. Jacob wished that Carl was still living with him and that he could share a demystifying laugh with him about it when he got home. It was going to look uncanny in the Žižkovižkov apartment. Maybe he would put it in a drawer right away rather than wait to forget it.
“Thank you,” Jacob said. He was on his guard. It would only be reasonable for Milena to want to know whether he had enough faith to appreciate the gift.
“It is of church,” she said. She laughed at the clumsiness of her English; she knew that it went without saying that such a figure belonged to the realm of churches. “It is of church we go,” she tried again to explain, gesturing to her children and herself. She didn’t indicate whether her husband went, too. Out of her there then spilled an account in Czech of her church, its location, its architecture, the saint it was named for, the priest who ministered there, and the parishioners who had returned to worship since the revolution. Jacob wasn’t able to follow everything she said and retreated into nodding. He couldn’t tell if the church was something new in her life or something that she was newly free to speak of. He had the sense that it stood for, or stood in the way of, a need that threatened to be overwhelming. In sympathy, maybe in hope of solidarity, he glanced at Prokop and Anežka, but there was no sign in them of resistance, unless they had taken refuge in a mild blankness.
From this blankness their mother released them by declaring that the family was going to go for a walk. Prokop groaned, then ran to get his soccer ball so that the time spent on the walk wouldn’t be a total loss. He began kicking it despite his mother’s insistence that he wait until they were outdoors. Anežka took up her doll . Then, changing her mind, she asked if she could carry one of the rabbits from downstairs. Halfheartedly and unsuccessfully Milena argued that Prokop should leave his soccer ball behind and walk quietly and dutifully. To Anežka she pointed out that the rabbit would be frightened by the soccer ball if by nothing worse and might run off.
—But he’s a good boy, Anežka said, in the rabbit’s defense.
“Please,�
� Milena asked, returning to English, “have you time? We take walk. You with us? For last time.”
“To the church?”
Milena shook her head, as if embarrassed now by her earlier confession.
“I could go for a little walk,” Jacob said, even though he wanted to get home to Milo.
—There is a prospect nearby, Milena said, resorting again to Czech. —It’s possible from there to see far. Are you well enough? I wanted to show it to you. And I will gather herbs for you, so that you can make a tea for yourself. For your cold. She named the plants that she wanted to gather, but even in English the names would have been lost on Jacob. —It will cure your throat, she promised.
Jacob made an effort to look open to believing in the remedy. He was never going to see anyone in the family again, and it seemed important not to disillusion them—to leave them with the impression that he believed in as much as they did—that he might keep the figurine, that he might go home and brew the tea.
Outside, after they had put on their shoes at the foot of the stairs, the group paused while Anežka unhooked the door of the hutch, took one of the rabbits into her arms, petted him, introduced him to Jacob, and regretted that the walk would be too scary for him. Prokop juggled his soccer ball on a foot. When the ball went astray into the garden, where orange squash blossoms were beginning to shrink inward, sensing the removal of the sun’s attention for the day, perhaps beginning the plant’s greater withdrawal into maturity, Jacob said, “Whoops,” and retrieved the ball for him.
Prokop giddily took up the new word as a refrain. Milena shook her head at the ebullience and glanced at Jacob to see if it was trying his patience. She scolded Prokop when he followed his ball into the street, though there were no cars, and Anežka, now rabbitless, joined in scolding him. The group followed the chaotic energy that seemed to be focused in the soccer ball, as if they were being pulled forward by something that kept slipping out of harness. Jacob was aware that he was still fighting off illness; he had the sense that there was a certain inefficacy to his idea of the world—that his idea wasn’t apprehending the world as firmly as it was necessary to apprehend it—that he and the world weren’t altogether real to each other.