by Caleb Crain
“Yes, I’d like to know as well,” Annie seconded. “We’re quite benighted, aren’t we,” she added, in solidarity.
Jacob looked to Henry, in the hope that Henry would save him from having to admit he had no idea what it was, either. Somehow the presence of Hans involved Jacob’s pride.
“It is an organized plan to steal the nation’s assets,” Hans pronounced, and there was a further silence.
Then Henry mildly—almost apologetically—explained that the coupon plan was a scheme for privatization. Small businesses were to be auctioned starting in January, but since there wasn’t enough private capital among Czechs and Slovaks to buy large businesses, they couldn’t be sold off the same way. The plan was to give every citizen vouchers, also called coupons, which could be used to bid on shares of large industries such as the national carmaker and the national brewery. Because the vouchers could be traded, it was hoped that they would instantly create a sort of meta–stock market. Critics worried that the common people would not know which companies were of any value and might be tricked into surrendering their vouchers too cheaply or end up with shares in dud companies.
“The danger is what you call insider trading,” said Hans, “an evil that you have under such excellent control in the West.”
Henry laughed politely.
“But you can’t want the state to keep the large industries,” Jacob protested, thinking he saw a flaw in Hans’s position.
“I can want that, as it happens. Socialism is not yet illegal in this country, whatever the case in yours. The working classes built the heavy industries with their labor, and they have the right to own them.”
“But they will own them, it sounds,” said Annie. “I don’t suppose we will be granted any vouchers? As workers here?”
“I’m afraid not,” Henry answered.
“No, I didn’t think so,” Annie said.
“The workers will not own them under such a system,” Hans corrected. “There is no better means for workers’ ownership than the state, led by the Communist Party.”
At this, Henry involuntarily glanced around; fortunately, however, no Czechs were in earshot. It was as if the expatriates had on their hands a drunk who had started to reminisce about a heartbreak, and they felt the responsibility of preventing him from starting a fight to console himself. Oblivious, and with a show of magnanimity, Hans topped up everyone’s glass. Annie tried to refuse but didn’t pull her glass away quickly enough. “If you insist,” she yielded.
“But where are the insiders to do the insider trading?” Jacob asked. He felt in him the combativeness that Daniel had used to arouse. “I mean, there aren’t any anymore, right? After the revolution.” Daniel was beautiful and Hans was not, so Jacob was hitting back lazily, a little wildly.
“Are you joking?” Hans asked. “Havel’s castle is full of lackeys and opportunists.”
“How do you know that?” Jacob challenged.
“There’s also the possibility that the Communists themselves will act as insiders,” Henry suggested. “State Security did quite a bit of industrial espionage.”
“Are you on about spies again?” Annie asked, drawing a Sparta out of her purse.
“We must hope that they, at least, will keep faith with their ideals and their training,” Hans said stiffly.
“Are you joking?” Jacob asked.
There was a flash of anger in Hans’s eyes, and it immediately shamed Jacob. Hans was on the losing side; he would soon be unemployed. It was unkind to embarrass him. It was even a betrayal of sorts, because he was Henry’s friend.
“I didn’t mean—,” Jacob began.
Hans smiled falsely. “It is understandable that an American should have trouble with, how should I say it, the idea of ideals. In your country they are hardly a force in public affairs.”
“Oh no, they are,” Jacob said.
“Then you shall tell me the name of the ideal that inspired your country to overthrow Allende, who was democratically elected, and to replace him with Pinochet, a torturer and a murderer. Do you know to what I am referring?”
“Yes, Chile,” Jacob was able to answer, but only because he had once read a novel about the coup. He felt a chill in his stomach and drank more of the sekt, to calm himself. “But it happened without our knowledge.”
“Ah, the American people and their knowledge. Indeed, they were so upset that a few years later their government gave money to death squads in El Salvador, and your military supervised torture in El Salvador’s prisons.”
Was this true? It seemed suspicious to Jacob that he had never heard the question argued before in this way, as if America were culpable rather than inadvertently complicit. He reproached himself for never having cared to find out the facts. It was surprising how tender he was about his country’s honor; he had always thought of himself as merely a critic, but his mouth was now dry with apprehensiveness. “Many Americans voted against Reagan because of El Salvador,” he said, somewhat tentatively.
The Dane sighed. From the heat of conflict, Hans’s face was lightly flushed, and in its corners, where prickly white sideburns gave way to finer curls, Jacob saw that he might have found Hans desirable, under other circumstances. Seeing that Jacob had finished his glass, Hans poured him another. It occurred to Jacob that this wasn’t the first refill, or even the second. “And Nicaragua?” Hans continued. “Are you going to defend your country’s actions in Nicaragua as well?” Hans’s manner was a little bit that of an older brother.
“I’m not defending any of it,” Jacob said. It was as a critic that he should answer Hans, he saw. “I’m saying that America does have ideals, and Iran-Contra is a perfect example, because when it was exposed, it was a national scandal. There were hearings in Congress. It was on the front page of every newspaper.”
“But Oliver North is not in jail,” Hans answered, with a quickness that suggested he had met the argument before, “and Mr. Bush, when he visited several weeks ago, to accept tribute from the so-called liberated Czechoslovakia, seemed still to be your president.”
“He isn’t my president.”
“Oh yes, he is.”
“You say that as if I had voted for him. You don’t know anything about me.”
“It is true, I don’t.”
The table fell silent. “I don’t want any more sekt,” Jacob declared, rising to his feet. The periphery of his vision darkened for a moment as he stood, and he had to wait for the blood to return to his head. “I’m going to get something else to drink,” he told his friends, meaning something nonalcoholic, and walked off toward the bar in the other room.
His thinking mind, as he walked, repeated the stages of the argument and struggled to improve his position, looking for new defenses and new points of attack—America’s benevolence to Western Europe and the Third World, the death in Stalin’s Russia of millions by starvation and gulag. But his deeper mind had fallen still. His eyes seemed not to see the faces he passed but to take impressions, the way children lay a blank white sheet of paper over an old headstone and raise its contours with a bar of charcoal. The still images his eyes took were not charcoal gray, however; they were gold, as if the boldness of the drums and horns was tinting what he saw. He was a stranger here. He wasn’t known to any of these people. A girl with a bandanna tied across her forehead as a headdress glanced down bashfully under his stare, and then up again to see if he was still looking. All these people were so happy in not knowing him.
He asked the bartender for a glass of tonic water, but the bartender merely looked at him. Jacob repeated himself, more loudly, but the man backed away and turned to another customer. Jacob started to accuse him of ill treatment but then realized that he’d been speaking in English. Of course the man hadn’t understood.
In Czech he succeeded in purchasing the tonic. He turned to face the band as he sipped it. He seemed to be standing at the best vantage point for seeing and hearing—at the focus of the room. The faces of the musicians shone with sweat;
their shirts were damp on the chests and under the arms. The metal of their instruments seemed to concentrate the room’s light, the gold, angry light that seemed to have more substance and presence than Jacob himself did. Their music was a kind of sorrowful shouting. It was American and not American, white and black. But it made no connection between these worlds, Jacob decided. He had drunk in Hans’s bitterness; his thoughts were saturated with it. The powerless tried to reach across with their art, he reasoned, but it was in the failure of the attempt that the powerful found their pleasure, which the powerless misunderstood as sympathy. The better the art, the more poignant the failure. The only one who really suffered under the illusion was the artist.
Jacob took one more sip of his sour tonic, and threw up—a sudden and horribly comic expulsion. For a moment, he leaned over the vomit on the floor in front of him, as if he were going to try to wipe it up with the handkerchief he always carried in his back pocket. But to his relief he had to acknowledge that there was too much of it. (What had he been eating? he of course wondered.) He was going to have to let someone else clean up his mess. He ran to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall.
There he felt abruptly clear-headed. He sat on the closed toilet seat and stared at the metal panels around him. The gold that had been coating his sight had subsided; now the air seemed dusty blue. He tried to reassure himself with the thought that throwing up was a silly and trivial offense. Young people often did it after drinking too much. He hadn’t thought that he ever would, but evidently it had been his turn to. That’s all it was.
“Jacob?” Thom called, after about a quarter of an hour. “Are you in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I needn’t tell anyone, if you don’t like.”
“You might as well. I’m going to stay in here forever.”
“Is it as bad as that?”
“I threw up in front of everyone. In the middle of the other room.”
“Was that you, then? You had a cross-eyed look when you left the table.”
“I’m going to wait here until everyone else in the club has gone home.”
Thom was too considerate to laugh. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, much better now.”
“I always feel much improved after a good retch, myself. Nasty stuff, that sekt. Should have warned you about it.”
“It shouldn’t be mixed with politics,” Jacob said, speaking through his hands.
“That Hans is rather full of himself, isn’t he. I know he’s Henry’s friend, but I didn’t appreciate his tone.”
“Oh, he’s all right. He just wanted a debate.”
“I thought he became a bit personal.”
“Only because I took it that way.”
A couple of strangers came into the men’s room. Jacob waited silently inside his stall, and Thom waited silently outside it, until they left.
“How shall we proceed, then?” Thom asked.
“The Czechs will yell at me if they see me.”
“I expect they’ve already forgotten about it, but we could keep them from seeing you, if you like.”
“Could you get my coat and hat? I can’t go back in there.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I just can’t go back in there.”
“I’ll fetch your coat, and then we’ll walk you out, all of us in a ring, if that’s agreeable. The way they do for heads of state, when they pass through a crowd that might have snipers.”
“That would be—that would be great. You’re a prince.”
It was a little too much to say, Jacob sensed, as soon as he spoke. From inside his metal box, he couldn’t see Thom’s face.
Left alone, Jacob inspected his clothes for spatter. He was clean. Gingerly he rose, let himself out of the stall, washed his hands and face, and drank from the tap. To feel a nation’s guilt was as spurious and grandiose as to take credit for its triumph. Yet both the guilt and the triumph were real, and the emotions were powerful. In the detachment of his half sobriety, somewhat like an invalid, Jacob handled the feelings as if they were dry pages that he could inspect or shuffle or fold up, as he chose.
“Are you all right, Jacob?” Annie asked, when his friends met him outside the men’s room in a group, as Thom had promised. Hans had stayed behind. “We were so concerned about you.”
“Go, go, go,” Jacob said, slipping into their midst and crouching so as not to be seen. He was already cheerful enough to make a game of it.
* * *
In the morning, Jacob lay for a while in bed in a state of dry alertness, looking up toward the blank plaster of his ceiling, until he heard four gentle knocks on his apartment door.
He shuffled into last night’s pants. “You have telephone,” said, speaking softly and pantomiming a phone call, as if she weren’t sure her English would get through at such an hour. Perhaps she had heard him come in late the night before. “Is brother,” she added.
“Brother?” Jacob asked. He didn’t have one.
She shrugged. “Yes, brother.” She continued in an even softer voice: “He say—excuse me, he say-s—to Father, that is your brother.” He could tell from her smile that she was ahead of him, but he could not figure the puzzle out. “Family—telephone—okay,” she hinted. “Father allow. Father allow-s.”
“Oh,” Jacob said, at last following.
She held up a finger to her lips. “Is American brother. Not Czech brother. I know, because I have spoke—have spoken—to him, also.” Being in on Jacob’s secret seemed to have given her confidence in her English.
“Thank you,” Jacob said, as they mounted the stairs. He tried to imagine who it was.
“Not at all,” she answered.
Beneath the African-style carvings of Tragedy and Comedy, Mr. Stehlík was sunk in his sofa, distrustfully eyeing a document propped on his knees. “So you have brother. I do not know this. I think, that you have only sister.”
“I do have a sister.” That much was true.
“Your brother says, that telephone is important,” Mr. Stehlík continued, waving Jacob toward the phone, with an exaggerated deference. “Please.” He took an ashtray and a handful of papers with him to the kitchen.
Jacob didn’t dare sit down. “Hello?” he said wonderingly into the phone.
“Jacob? This is your brother Carl.”
Carl was one of the straight men whom Jacob had fallen for the year before, in Somerville. They had met at a dinner party thrown by a man who was having a nervous breakdown, of which the dinner party had been in several ways a symptom, and the spirit with which they had gotten through that evening—a shared recognition of the irrationality, an unspoken agreement to treat it as lightly and tactfully as possible—had been continued in their friendship, where it had made it relatively easy for them to finesse Jacob’s brief, awkward confession of romantic interest. By the time Jacob had been disabused, the two had become a little more than friends—they were conspirators, confidants. There was always melody in Carl’s voice, and hearing it now—it rose on Jacob’s name, then fell from even higher during the pronouncement that followed, as if it were a serious revelation, only to curl up in a chuckle at the end, over Carl’s own name, as if that were the biggest joke of all—Jacob thought that he had fallen for its music more than anything else.
“It’s so good to hear from you,” Jacob said. Then, confused by the delay in the transatlantic line, they both spoke at once:
“I apologize for the—”
“Are you coming to vis—”
They waited for the echoes to subside.
“You go first,” Jacob said.
“It’s hard to reach you, man. Is that your landlord? Is he listening now?”
“Yes. Not to you.”
“Okay, well, that guy, he’s got a serious pole up his ass.”
“It really is very good to hear from you.”
“He’s like, ‘Telephone busy. Is family? Only family!’ I’m sorry i
f I get you in trouble, but I had to get through.” Carl gave Mr. Stehlík a Russian accent when he imitated him, rather than a Czech one—gluey and sonorous, rather than spare and flat. The wrongness of it gave Jacob a flash of homesickness. He felt a nostalgia for not knowing the difference.
“Are you coming to visit?”
“I’d like to, but that’s not why I’m calling, I’m afraid.” He stopped. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”
“What?”
“Your friend Meredith?” Carl paused, but then he evidently decided to get it over with. “She died. She killed herself, actually.”
“She—”
“Matthew called me, because I had your number. He wasn’t up to telling you. I’m sorry.”
Jacob said nothing for a little while.
“How’re you doing?” Carl asked.
“Fine. Is Matthew all right?”
“He’s all right. I mean, he sounds really broken up. But he’s all right. They stopped going out a while ago. She was going out with another guy.” Carl gave the man’s name.
“I don’t know him,” Jacob said. He didn’t at that moment feel as if he knew Meredith, either, but he found that he was crying. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw poke her head into the living room for a nervous look, and then bow out apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” Carl repeated. “I wish I had known her better and could talk about her with you. I did meet her that one time, at your house for dinner.”
“That was the last time I saw her, too,” Jacob realized.
“She was a poet, I think you said.”
“I can’t talk about her right now.”
A suicide makes a fault in a novel, as suicides make a fault in life, and only the shadow of Meredith’s story falls on this one, as if in leaving a movie theater she had walked across the path of the projector.
Jacob asked for details. Carl told him about a hotel room and an overdose, and then a second hotel room and a rope.
“Why didn’t anyone lock her up?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it isn’t so easy, you know.”
