by Caleb Crain
“Berlin. I was thinking of moving there, but I’m not going to.”
“Ah, Deutschland. And why did you not like it?”
“I don’t know. The people there are kind of hard.”
“They are the hardest people in the world, and Americans are the softest, and between the two there is equal danger.”
“It sounds as if someone has been breaking your heart.”
“You are always breaking my heart, Kuba, but do not joke about it tonight.”
A song ended, and a few of Ota’s acolytes came in from the dance floor, like Fagin’s children returning from the streets. They gave Jacob nods of recognition. One pushed toward Ota a rum and cola he had brought him from the bar.
“Do you know if Luboš is coming tonight?” Jacob asked.
“And how would I know this, Kuba?” The faces of his acolytes were so cautious that Jacob couldn’t tell whether they were following the exchange. “Luboš, Luboš,” Ota complained.
“I haven’t spoken to him for a few weeks,” Jacob said, and blushed as if he were admitting to an embarrassing desire.
“There is mystery with him, yes?” Ota answered. “You are always beginning to know him, only.”
“He is always virgin again,” risked one of the boys.
“Shut up,” ordered Ota. “Kuba is also always virgin.” He stroked Jacob’s hand once, and only once, protectively, and then laughed the moment away.
A couple of beers later, Jacob’s eye paused on an unassuming suit, and then he recognized the dry features of the man wearing it. Collin was talking to a man younger than he was, but not so much younger as to belong without effort to the bar’s circulation of glances and poses. Collin had been standing there long enough to fall into the stillness and economy of gesture of a hunter in a blind. Jacob had probably looked at him a number of times without seeing him.
“Ah, not him, Kuba,” Ota advised, as Jacob rose.
“But he might know,” Jacob answered, and confident with alcohol and the lateness of the hour, he made his way toward Collin, across the bar.
—Pardon me, Jacob said in French. Since neither man acknowledged him, he repeated himself. —Pardon me.
Collin nodded, and his companion turned his eyes on Jacob.
—No one has introduced us, but I believe you know a friend of mine, Jacob said.
—I wasn’t aware of it, Collin answered. He gave no encouragement to proceed.
—I had the impression that you knew Luboš.
—Yes, I know him. He didn’t bother to meet Jacob’s eye, though his companion watched Jacob steadily. Jacob realized that because his French, however stiff, was better than his Czech, he was able to feel the chill in Collin’s manner more sharply than he could feel it with someone like Ivan the doorman.
—I have not heard any news of Luboš lately, Jacob continued, feeling he had nothing to lose, and then, wanting to provoke Collin, he added: —Is he in France again?
—No, Collin answered. He showed no surprise at Jacob’s knowledge, and no curiosity about it, just as he had shown none when Jacob had begun by addressing him in French.
—Do you know how I might get in touch with him?
—I’m afraid I can’t help you. You will excuse me, there is a matter I was discussing with my colleague.
They waited for Jacob to leave.
“I don’t understand,” Jacob admitted when he returned to Ota’s table.
“Cough on him, as we say,” Ota advised. “He is not a suitable person.”
* * *
Jacob tried Luboš’s number one more time the next afternoon.
“Moment,” said the man who picked up. “Message.”
Jacob didn’t know whether he was going to be given a message or asked to leave one. The line was silent for almost a full minute. Finally he tried to speak again and was again interrupted.
“Moment, moment,” the man said sternly. Then, more gently and more slowly, “Tomorrow, Sunday, fourteen hours. Under clock. Yes?”
Jacob repeated the details back, the phone trembling against his ear.
The hour was at the center of a bright, cold afternoon. Jacob arrived early. Across the plaza, in front of the glass-walled pastry shop, four Czech teenagers were singing in English. A small crowd ringed them, composed of as many Czechs as tourists; there were few tourists now that the days had grown short. Jacob’s coat had at last come, and he was wearing it—seal-gray, polyester, with lumpy padding, still musty from the closet in central Massachusetts where it had been stored.
He was looking in the window of a bookstore—a strict one, where you were allowed to walk through the aisles in one direction only—and wondering if he had time to see whether they had a Czech-English dictionary in stock yet, when he heard Luboš salute him.
He was the most handsome man in sight, as always. —But you are early, Luboš noted.
—And you, ‘late but nevertheless,’ Jacob answered. It was one of the mottoes of last November’s revolution.
—I am not late, Kuba. I am precise, as a good Czech. He looked Jacob over frankly, as if for him, too, the interval had dissolved a resistance he hadn’t known consciously how to overcome. In his smile Jacob saw a chipped front tooth. It gave Jacob a pang to think that he hadn’t noticed it earlier and never would have, if they hadn’t managed this reunion.
—You have something…, Jacob said, tapping his own tooth.
—That happened when I was a child. He covered his mouth with a hand, as if to press it shut. Then he smiled again, abandoning the effort. —At least I am not a vampire, he added. This was a reference to Jacob’s eyeteeth. Their first night together, he had discovered that Jacob felt both bashful and proud of the teeth’s prominence.
—I am happy, that we are seeing each other, Jacob said, because he was bursting with it and felt that he had to say so.
—I too. I missed you. In Czech, missing had to be said in the thirdperson singular, like raining, and so Luboš didn’t seem to reveal as much by the confession as he would have in English. But it touched Jacob anyway. He again had the sense that a barrier between them had fallen. He hoped it was that he no longer seemed so young to Luboš. He stepped on Luboš’s foot because he couldn’t think of another way to touch him in the open square.
On Národní , a gallery was exhibiting the hand-drawn typography of a Czech illustrator, and Jacob proposed seeing it.
—He is the author of a children’s book, that everyone read, said Luboš.
—I didn’t know that, Jacob admitted. —I liked the poster, simply.
They passed the singers. They also passed under a wrought iron balcony. Melinda had recently pointed it out to Jacob as the place where Havel had stood a year ago when he declared the republic. As they walked, Jacob leaned shoulder to shoulder against Luboš, who, Jacob remembered, either did not know where Havel had stood or had pretended not to. It would be rude to insist on knowing which was the case.
—It is for Juliet, Jacob said, pointing at the balcony. There was something fanciful in its metalwork vines.
—Yes, Romeo, Luboš answered, while he also answered Jacob’s pressure against his shoulder. Perhaps Melinda was misinformed. The balcony seemed to keep a kind of watch over them as it receded.
—You know, I looked for you, Jacob said.
—I know, Collin told me of it.
Jacob took alarm. —Did I make trouble?
—How could you make trouble, Kuba?
—I can, Jacob insisted, but in fact he was relieved to hear that his conversation with Collin hadn’t led to anything.
—I don’t believe.
—I went to Berlin for a weekend, Jacob said, to introduce his proof.
—And you were not a good boy?
—No.
—How so?
—With an actor. Are you angry?
—Very.
—I apologize, Jacob said, flushing.
Luboš hesitated, as if he needed a moment to verify that he wasn’t in ear
nest and that Jacob was. —I’m only talking nonsense, Kuba. We’re not playing a tragedy.
Jacob inspected Luboš’s face, sideways, not sure whether to believe him.
—With an actor, Luboš echoed. —But you really are very bad. They will have to keep an eye on you.
—Who will? Jacob asked, delightedly.
—They.
—But they don’t exist anymore.
—So think you. Even when you are guilty, it is innocently.
—Oh no, Jacob protested. —You have to leave me something, on which I can stand.
—You are a rascal then. Is that enough for you?
—That’s excellent.
Glass cases along three walls of a gray room told the artist’s story. Upon leaving art school in the 1960s, when the relenting of Communist orthodoxy that followed Stalin’s death seemed finally, a decade late, to be reaching Prague, he had taken a job as a designer and illustrator. He lettered children’s books with a playful, almost flowery script, painted ironic brooches of rubies and garnets as vignettes for a discreet edition of Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels, and designed the jackets for a daring series of pocket-size novellas, several of whose authors were later to become dissidents.
—You understand, after 1968 this was not possible, said Luboš. The artist had never done anything openly political. But after Czechoslovakia’s style of socialism was “normalized” by Russian tanks, the artist took the precaution of working exclusively in the children’s division of his publishing house. In a tamer but still uneven hand, he wrote out the words in innocuous books of Slavic folklore—tales of tricksters and princesses—and in fantasies of elves and goblins by Western writers deemed safe for import. He illustrated an edition of Candide with somber images borrowed from the darker of these fantasies, but a censor thought he saw analogies, and the book was never published. On the gallery wall hung one of the unused drawings; the lines forming the face of the naïf hero seemed like scrawls that converged only by chance, and the hatching over his breast resembled a crossing out. After the setback, the artist retreated further. By the start of the 1980s, he had limited himself to illustrating picture books of typical Czech families living through the small adventures of daily life. He drew and lettered them with an abandonment of control and disregard for finesse that suggested that he, too, was somehow a child, as unformed as the children he wrote for. The blots and unevennesses suggested a child’s intensity of effort. At this point, he decided to risk writing a picture book of his own, adding to the domestic formula only a fluffy dog of an absurdist size and dirtiness.
—Every child in Czechoslovakia loves this dog, Luboš explained.
It had wild eyes and a somehow reassuring shapelessness. —And you? Jacob asked.
—I am too old, said Luboš, with a touch of reproach at having been made to say it. —But it is very sympathetic.
Made bolder by success, the artist applied his new childlike style to illustrations of Tristram Shandy in the late 1980s, taking as his own the wriggling lines that Sterne had drawn to represent the path of his stories. In a dramatic irony, at this moment of return to an adult audience, the artist’s struggle was overtaken by the revolution and he became free to address whomever he wanted.
Luboš was silent as they took in the exhibit, except when they came to a book translated from English, such as an illustration from the 1970s of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, pictured emerging with the Fawn from the wood where things have no name. Then he asked whether Jacob had read it as a child. He was more absorbed than Jacob had expected him to be.
—Do you like the exhibit? Jacob asked.
His studied neutrality returned to his eyes. —I don’t know. It is a little sad, I think.
—Sad, that he could not draw freely? Jacob suggested.
—That is true, but it is also sad that his innocence was genuine, I think.
—But it became knowledge. In the limited vocabulary they shared, Jacob found himself speaking so generally he hardly understood what he was saying.
—A childlike knowledge, which is a kind of promise. But you misunderstand me. It is sad because it will no longer serve.
—Why not?
Luboš shrugged. —And do you like it? he returned the question.
—I do, Jacob said. He felt the artist had found a way to save force by indirection. To keep alive an impulse in danger of being smothered.
—It is like you, Luboš said, thinking aloud.
—No! Jacob replied, more sharply than he intended.
—Yes, it is like you. It is a kind of innocence and a promise…He turned away from Jacob with embarrassment, as if he knew it was impolite to turn a person into a symbol.
Jacob thought he saw Luboš deciding that he was too young and fragile. But he was not as innocent as his wish to follow history to Prague, if that wish was in fact an innocent one. —On the poster the artist calls this his first and last exhibit, as if this were the only moment for it. Until now his innocence was not understandable and after now it will not be possible.
—But no, don’t say that, Luboš answered, in a lower voice. —For I have decided I want to have you in your silly innocence.
Later that afternoon, in Jacob’s apartment, was the only time with Luboš when Jacob felt that nothing was reserved.
* * *
“Have a little faith, won’t you,” Annie said.
“Kafka’s house is over there,” Jacob protested.
“But it’s around the corner from Kafka’s house. It’s this street, I’m sure of it.”
“Who’s meeting us?” Jacob asked.
“Hans,” answered Henry. “Someone I know from work.”
“Bit of a soldier of fortune, isn’t he,” said Thom.
“He does seem to have got around.”
“Is all that true, then?” Thom continued. “About his being in the trenches in Beirut when Mossad attacked, the bodies falling to the right and to the left of him and so forth?”
“Where’s he from?” Jacob asked.
“He’s Danish,” Henry explained. “One of the last great believers. He went to Moscow and the Russians sent him here.”
Annie stopped and raised one hand. “Do you hear anything?”
“Could that be it,” suggested Thom. The large white door of a wedding-cake-like apartment building was propped open by a sign painted with the word JAZZ and a red arrow.
The four of them climbed a spiral staircase that rose behind and around the cylindrical cage of an unmoving elevator.
“And you didn’t believe me,” Annie said at the third story, where the burble of talk and clinking glasses met them.
“What do you mean, the Russians sent him here?” Jacob asked.
“They gave him a position at the international students’ center on Vinohradská, the one that looks like an unpleasantly large spider,” Henry replied. “The one Parliament voted last week to shut down. A web of the KGB, they called it, in an allusion to the architecture. As it was, in fact.”
“Is Hans KGB, then?” Thom asked. “He seems to want to give that impression.”
“If he were, I don’t think they would have left him here,” Henry said softly. “But don’t say I said so.”
“Och, it’s so full of espionage, Prague, to hear you talk,” Annie commented. “Bags I the entrance fees.” She rummaged in her purse for bills.
Trumpets and other horns sounded through two tall, hot rooms, set in an L along two sides of the building. The band sat on risers in one end; in front of them and continuing around the corner of the L were staggered a double row of long gray linoleum tables with metal legs, such as might be set up in a school gym in America on election day. So loud was the music in the band’s room that Jacob and his friends felt it fluttering against the skin of their faces. They turned the corner into the L’s farther leg, where it was possible to talk, and Henry waved to a stout blond-pink man with curly hair, who had to be Hans.
“Henry, my fellow!” the man said. Henry submitted t
o a hearty embrace. “I am drinking sekt. I hope you will join me.”
“What’s sekt?” Jacob asked. Even in this room one had to speak at a certain volume.
“Ah, the American,” Hans commented.
—If you please, four glasses and another bottle, Henry asked a waiter in Czech, matching the rhythm of his request to that of the waiter, who was hurriedly collecting empties at their table’s far end.
Brass and jabber were flooding the room and rising around the gatherings of drinkers and rendering each gathering an island. Scattered among the tables were a few young Westerners like themselves, unshaven but freshly showered, who had probably chanced upon the club thanks to the placard in the street. But for the most part, the rooms were full of Czechs—some intent upon the music, others flowering with the beer into an openheartedness rarely shown in public. They seemed even happier than the Czechs who drank at U , and Jacob realized that the music had brought them. Middle-aged rather than young, they regarded one another with the familiar boldness of those who have grown up together.
“Are you pleased about Denmark, then?” Henry asked. The Danish team had defeated Spain the night before.
Hans was loud and precise in his satisfaction. Under this cover, Annie leaned in to ask, “Have you seen your man since we came back? What’s his name again?”
“Luboš. Yes. It went well.”
“And what do you make of this fascist government?” Hans asked, addressing the group generally.
“Do you mean the coupon plan?” Henry asked.
“It’s plunder, of course,” Hans said, answering his own question. “I am surprised that they have waited so many months.”
Hans’s eagerness to put forward his opinion reminded Jacob of Daniel. Hans’s features were rounder; his skin, paler and thicker. “You think it’s a bad idea?” Jacob ventured, despite not knowing what the coupon plan was. Under the sweetness of the sekt there was a metallic tang, which was a sort of provocation.
“Of course. It’s lottery capitalism, without disguise.” His tone was contemptuous.
“Well, they haven’t passed the law yet,” Henry said, by way of conciliation.
There was a silence until Thom asked, “What is this coupon plan, then? I seem to have overlooked it in my careful study of the Czech press.”
