by Caleb Crain
At the end of the first block the group turned left; at the end of the next block, right. They left the neighborhood where the family lived, full of older villas, for a sort of real estate developer’s fallow, a scrub wilderness of oddly shaped vacant lots on the periphery of a newish complex of paneláky. Children had beaten a dirt path through the fallow. Milena paused to twist a few purple twigs off of a spindly willow; in a clearing that was still sunny, she picked what looked like tiny daisies. She carried her little harvest in a pouch that she improvised by holding up the skirt of her apron.
The ground grew so uneven that Prokop gave up on his soccer drills. A white boulder ended their path with an appearance of having fallen across it. Prokop was the first to scramble up. Upon joining him, Jacob saw that they stood at the top of a tall escarpment. An eroding slurry of blond rock led downward; far below, the black Vltava wound in a gentle S. Milena warned her children to keep away from the edge, but it was not so steep as to be dangerous.
By suppressing the growth of the scrub trees, boulder and slurry had cut a sightline to the west. The vista to be had through the gap was a pastoral. On the far side of the river, in a bend of it, a green field was being mown. Horses were drawing steel rigs, under the guidance of men with dinted torsos, so distant and so far below that only the facts of horses, steel, and men were discernible. The scene was gilded by the sun, which was low but still full of power. Because no more than the presence of the men could be seen, Jacob let himself stare at them freely, his motive for staring all but invisible. Beyond the field, stretching toward the horizon, waited a forest, over which a blue haze seemed to be settling.
“What’s over there?” Jacob asked.
Milena shrugged. —It’s called Šárka.
“It’s a park, isn’t it,” Jacob said.
—Yes, it’s a valley, she answered.
He thanked her for having brought him to see it.
“Please I must to say something you,” she said in her halting English. “You have free…”
“Freedom?”
“Yes. Is very dear.” She seemed worried by the boldness of her words, and she looked at him as shyly as her daughter sometimes did, despite the whiteness of her hair and despite the matronly bun that she wore it in.
“You’re free here now, too,” Jacob said. “Here in Czechoslovakia.” It felt safer to him to turn away her compliment; he wasn’t sure he understood it.
“Maybe I said not right. You have free”—she paused, having remembered that Jacob had corrected her use of the word, but already having forgotten how he had corrected it; she soldiered on—“free”—she reached out and without touching pointed quickly, in a birdlike motion, at the left side of his chest, wincing as she did so at the temerity and possible rudeness of the gesture—“here. It is not America, in you. Ne jenom.”
“Not only,” Jacob translated for her.
She bit a curled index finger as she tried to conjure up more of the words that she needed. Meanwhile, at the front of the boulder, Prokop was throwing pebbles into the vista, and Anežka was helping him by gathering ammunition. It occurred to Jacob that he wasn’t going to get to see the children grow up, but there were a lot of children he wouldn’t see grow up. “You have sensitive…,” she tried again.
“How does being sensitive make me free?” Jacob asked. He had become fairly certain that the opposite was the case.
Milena laughed and shrugged, embarrassed either because she couldn’t answer or because she hadn’t understood his question. “You know things,” she tried again. “Of people.”
Jacob nodded noncommittally.
With some agitation she pointed at his breast again. “You have sensitive sool.”
She must have looked the word up. “Soul.”
“Ah.” She seemed remorseful at having mispronounced it. “And I, too, have sensitive soul,” she continued, “that you will return to us.”
“Maybe you mean ‘impression’?”
“Yes. It is osud.”
“Osud is fate.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, taking his translation for concurrence.
Though he hadn’t quite understood, he was reluctant to ask her to explain further. It would have been immodest to ask to hear a compliment repeated, and if her interest in his soul was no more than a pretext for proselytizing, maybe he preferred not to see through it. It was possible after all that she had sensed something about him, even if only a penumbra of the sexual freedom that he had kept hidden from her. And it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that he might return some day. Her mysticism fell in with an idea of himself that he wanted to keep as long as he could—of himself as a person on an errand whose nature was still unfolding. When he left, in a few days, he was probably going to have to give the idea up; in America it probably wouldn’t be salutary to go on imagining that he had an exemption from a more definite, a more disillusioned story. He was willing to leave behind with Milena, or with his memory of her, like a thread left behind in a maze, the possibility that his errand could somehow persist despite his abandonment of it, in a disregarded state, incomplete unless someday he found a way to come back to it.
* * *
—What if I were to write you a letter, Milo suggested.
—Well, I’d look forward, Jacob replied.
It was Saturday, the day chosen for the swimming party at Šárka. The two of them were seated aboard a tram that was clattering steadily forward, unimpaired, in accordance with its nature as a mechanical thing, by the heat that they were passing through. Earlier passengers had opened all the windows of the car, and by the tram’s motion a wet air was drawn in, which buffeted ineffectually against their faces, knees, and arms. Jacob had set his backpack on a seat, but Milo was too well mannered to make use of any more seats than the one that he was sitting in, even though they had the car nearly to themselves. Milo’s towel was slung over one of his shoulders, and he had begun to sweat a shadow under it, as well as a circle in the front of his shirt.
They were traveling along the road that led to the airport. There seemed to be more placards advertising rooms than Jacob remembered having seen when he had come this way with Melinda half a year before, to pick up Carl, though he wasn’t confident of the accuracy of his memory or the precision of his earlier observation. He wondered if the bus tomorrow would take him along the same route.
Though a little melancholy, he felt perfectly healthy, perhaps because he had brewed Milena’s wild-herb tea the night before. Milo had advised him to stew the twigs in one pot and the daisies in another, but Jacob had impatiently tumbled all the debris into a single soup bowl, over which he had poured steaming water. The flotsam had swirled up; with a spoon he had tamped it back down; and after a few minutes the fluid had turned a shade of sepia. It had tasted bitter. —Maybe you were supposed to peel the twigs, Milo had belatedly suggested. Jacob had forced himself to drink it despite its acerbity.
The tea seemed to have worked—or if the tea hadn’t, a night’s sleep had—and this morning Jacob’s head and mind were clear. He felt so lucid that he seemed to perceive not only the world but also the biases of his mind in perceiving it. He saw quite clearly, for example, that he didn’t want to leave Prague the next day, as he had planned to. He would have to take himself in hand. For a long time, he had only been able to enjoy himself by bearing in mind that he was leaving—that his irresponsibility was temporary—but today he was so close to his departure that he could feel it, the way one can feel the touch of a shadow on a hot enough day, and he saw that he had to alter the structure of his mental compensations. He saw that now he would only be able to enjoy the time that remained if he pretended to himself that he was going to stay after all. He had to tell himself that it was another person who was going to ride the bus along this highway tomorrow—an optative self, riding a lane or two parallel to the tram that was now carrying him. He was fond of the scuffed, painted metal of this tram’s interior, its gray bucket seats, the sleepy fullness of the air, and
the warm-cool side of Milo’s right arm against his own left one. A sense of anticipation also held him in the moment. If he were to leave tomorrow, nothing would come of these attaching feelings. So it must be the case, he told himself with conscious illogic and mendacity, that he wasn’t going to leave.
—How will your friends look on me? Milo asked, interrupting Jacob’s thoughts.
—When you’re naked?
—That, no. Nakedness lies on your heads, with you Americans. How will they look at me as a person?
—I don’t know, said Jacob.
—With their eyes, I guess, Milo joked.
—They’ll look at you as a friend of mine, Jacob proposed.
—They’re not buggers.
—They’re not, Jacob confirmed. —So maybe they won’t look at you at all.
—They’re not even Czechs.
—It’ll be normal, Jacob tried to assure him.
In a while the tram came to its last stop, halfway around a little rotary that it circled in order to reverse direction. The conductor shot open the doors, and before Jacob and Milo could gather their bags, he stomped heavily out of the car himself to have a cigarette and stretch his legs. To the north was parkland, thick with greenery. Milo nodded good day to the conductor, who was pacing as he smoked, and the two of them walked into the artificial wilderness.
The trees and lawns made the day’s heat more temperate. After about ten minutes they came to a reservoir, long and narrow. Grass ran down to its banks. The opposite shore, where maples stooped over the water, unmirroring because shadowed, was only a stone’s throw away, but to the north the clear, dark water continued until it bent rightward out of sight. Looking that way, the eye could mistake the body of water for a slow-moving river.
Annie and Elinor waved. They were sitting on an oatmeal-colored blanket, which Annie must have smuggled out of the . They were wearing white blouses over their swimsuits. Annie parked her oversize, amber-tinted sunglasses in her hair, as they approached, and squinted up at them.
“ ,” she said to Milo, extending her hand. “That’s right, isn’t it, Jacob?”
“I think so.”
“Ale mluviš tak ,” said Milo. You speak such pretty Czech.
“Ale ne, unfortunately,” Annie replied. “I can hardly speak it at all, as you’ll discover. But it is good to meet you at last. Jacob has kept you so to himself.”
Milo smiled noncommittally, perhaps uncomprehendingly.
“I mean it’s a pity we haven’t met before,” Annie continued. “But that’s Jacob’s fault, you know. Vina je jeho. It’s his mistake.”
“Muže za všecko, ovšem,” Milo answered.
“What does he say, Jacob?”
“He says I’m to blame for everything.”
“He is, isn’t he,” Annie agreed. “And most of all for leaving us. Bloody selfish of him.”
“ ,” said Elinor, from beside Annie on the blanket.
“Oh, this is Elinor, sorry,” said Annie. “Kamarádka moje.”
“ ,” replied Milo, with a half bow.
“You’re a right fool, you know,” Annie said to Jacob, aside. “He’s quite fit. I wouldn’t give him up.”
“Co ?” Milo asked.
Before Jacob could translate, Annie interrupted with alarm: “Don’t tell him.” She made a show of looking crestfallen at Jacob’s willingness to betray her confidence.
“ ti to ,” said Jacob.
“No, don’t tell him later, either. That’s no better.” Then she thought better of her tactics and addressed Milo again herself: “I said you were handsome,” she confessed. She checked with Jacob: “Is it all right, to say that?”
“, že jsi hezký,” Jacob translated.
“No, diky,” Milo thanked Annie, with some embarrassment.
“He isn’t blushing, is he?” Annie asked. “I meant it in a kind way.”
“I don’t think anyone really ever minds being told they’re handsome,” Elinor reassured her.
“No, sometimes they do mind. Sometimes it isn’t polite to make personal comments,” Annie said, regretfully. “I’m sorry I’m all aflutter,” she told Jacob. “I’ve never met any of your ‘friends’ before.”
“‘Friends’?”
“Whatever you call them. What does he do, by the way?”
“He’s a photographer,” Jacob answered.
“To sotva,” Milo qualified.
“He says I’m exaggerating,” Jacob translated.
“Well, it’s hard, isn’t it, to be anything,” Annie said. “So I find, at any rate. I’m a teacher, for the moment,” she declared to Milo. “,” she said, patting her chest.
Jacob and Milo laid their towels down beside the women’s blanket.
—You, said Milo, nodding at Annie, —are Irish?
“I am, yes,” said Annie, with a glance at Jacob to acknowledge him as the source of the information.
—And you, Milo continued, looking now at Elinor, —also Irish?
—English, Elinor answered in Czech.
—I, Moravian, Milo told them.
—Truly? said Jacob. He hadn’t ever asked. —I thought you were a Praguer.
—Father and Mother were born in Moravia, in a little town that is called . We have a river and a little bridge with statues, like the Charles Bridge but prettier. We have a small, square castle.
—Is there a forest? Jacob was trying to picture it.
—Around the castle. Forest and meadows. I’ll show them to you. When you come back.
Jacob had never said he would come back, but the word for “when” could also mean “if.” —I’m from Texas.
—And where do you keep your hat? Milo replied.
They subsided into individual enjoyment of the sun. Annie lowered her glasses. Milo stripped off his shirt and settled back on his elbows. Jacob remained sitting up, his arms around his knees. He wished he could see Milo’s little town, but he would give that up, too. One had to impose a certain amount of structure on one’s life.
“Are we sitting in the nudist section?” he asked.
“I believe so,” said Annie. “Those two women to our right are topless, aren’t they.”
“Oh,” said Jacob. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I didn’t suppose you would. Don’t look at them now, Jacob.”
“I don’t get to see breasts very often.”
“You aren’t any less philistine, are you. I don’t know why I thought you would have a measure of sophistication.”
“Up there seems to be the clothed section,” explained Elinor, pointing north. “Where those little buildings are.” She indicated a few white-painted wood structures, set back a ways from the water, the sort of summer makeshifts whose little-cared-for condition suggests that they must always have existed, always as sun-faded as they are now.
Annie spotted Jana, Thom, and Henry walking toward them up the green. To counterbalance her belly, Jana was leaning back on her haunches as she walked. The men had slowed their pace to match hers.
“May I share your blanket?” Jana asked. She let Thom and Henry, each holding one of her hands, lower her into a sitting position. Like her belly, her breasts, too, were round and heavy, though they were loose, whereas her belly was taut. Thom took a folded blanket out of their bag and tucked it under her as a cushion.
“Can I slip off your shoes for you?” offered Annie.
“Pull,” she said to Annie, as she raised one foot at a time.
“Still wearing all your togs, I see, Annie,” Thom commented.
“I’ve only got on just the swimsuit, really, under this camisole.”
“Just this side of decency.”
“For the time being. Have you met Jacob’s man?”
“Is this him?”
Milo was made slightly bashful by their attention. Jana spoke to him in Czech: —When Jacob told us, that you showed him Amerika, I told him, that I would show him Šárka.
—A good idea, Milo agreed.
“Thanks for arranging it,” Jacob said in English.
“It is for myself that I arranged it. I must take every pleasure while I still can.”
“And she came to look at the girls,” said Thom.
“It is true,” Jana admitted. “I wanted to see them and to remember that I will look something like one again some day.”
“You’re beautiful now,” Annie assured her.
“Feel.” She pulled the back of Annie’s hand against her cheek.
“Like a baby’s bottom, isn’t it,” Thom said.
“It’s so soft,” Annie agreed.
“And here’s another transformation,” said Thom, clapping his hands on his potbelly.
“Is it soft, too?” Henry asked.
“Feel it for yourself, why don’t you,” Thom offered, lifting up his T-shirt to expose it.
“That’s all right, mate.”
“It’s like a baby’s bottom. A hairy, old baby. Anyone else like a feel?”
“Jacob was telling us that Milo is a photographer,” Annie said to Jana, in an effort to restore propriety.
—Only as an amateur, Milo said.
“Jana’s a journalist,” Annie told Milo.
—An interpreter, Jana for her part qualified. —I merely work with journalists.
Milo asked Jana the name of the newspaper. When he didn’t recognize it, she excused him, on the grounds that after all it was written for expatriates like their boyfriends rather than for Czechs like themselves.
—I’m not working right now, Milo said of himself, —but next month I’m going to Karlovy Vary, where I’ll be a casino employee.
—A casino, Jana replied. —They must trust you.
—I might only be some kind of barman. I don’t yet know.
—You’ll learn excellent English.
—Well, maybe German.
In first conversations, a gay person not in the closet sometimes has to fend off a straight’s attempts to demonstrate good will. In conversation with Jana, Jacob thought, Milo might also feel obliged to show that he didn’t mind that his job was less promising than hers. The difference in the nature of their jobs was likely caused, after all, in large part by the difference between his gay world and her straight one.