by Caleb Crain
“But you didn’t like it,” said Jacob.
“You haven’t been listening,” she accused him, and the room trilled brightly. “It’s only the end I dislike. Just a page, really. What leads up to it is quite beautiful. In that savage way, where you describe how devastated people are by each other.”
“Devastated?” Jacob asked.
“So I find, yes. By men, in particular. The cunning way they have of telling you how awfully they intend to behave. She’s quite good on that.”
“I’m not awful.”
Melinda interposed: “As yet you haven’t had much of a chance to be, or so you’ve given us to understand.” The echoes of her voice, warmer than Annie’s, seemed to set up a chatter like running water.
“You’ll see, if you read it,” Annie insisted.
They fell silent. The presence of their selves seemed reinforced by the room’s acoustics, while the room’s isolation seemed to relieve them of the burden of display.
“Kaspar asked if I would read some pages from his translation,” Melinda said, “and looked so crestfallen when I said I had no German.”
“Did he? He didn’t ask me,” Annie complained. “Of course my German is rubbish.”
“But one wants to be asked.”
“Mmm.”
“Is he still sick?” Jacob inquired.
“I’m afraid so,” Melinda answered.
“It’s quite sad. He lives in such a hole,” Annie reported.
“Have you visited him?” Jacob asked.
“I brought him a few tinned things Tuesday week,” Annie said. “Sardines and beets and such like.”
“Did you visit, too?”
“I did,” admitted Melinda.
“Should I?”
“He sets a great value on your esteem, as do we all of course,” Melinda answered. “But you oughtn’t to feel obliged.”
“Oh no,” Annie agreed.
“He does still call you the writer. ‘How is Jacob the writer?’ So you have that to live up to.”
“Even though I haven’t written anything.”
“He needn’t know that.”
“Henry is still very keen to write,” Annie put in. “He thinks that with the addition of Carl you could have a proper community of writers. With meetings and such. No girls allowed, of course.”
“The cheek,” said Melinda.
“Nobody told me,” Jacob said.
Annie shrugged as she took a drag of her cigarette.
“Would you bring Kaspar something from me, if you go?” Melinda asked. “But he must promise to send back the dish once he’s eaten what’s in it. It’s the last I have.”
Three days later, Jacob found himself in a neighborhood of villas gray with coal dust between Žižkovižkov and Vršovice, just beyond the city’s great cemeteries. He was bearing a creamed chicken casserole from Melinda, still warm, and in his backpack, a can of red currants from his own pantry. At Kaspar’s building, he took out a key that Melinda had lent him and let himself in through a glass front door. It fell shut behind him heavily. “Kaspar?” he said aloud, through echoes, but no one answered. The walls of the corridor were painted lime green below and skim-milk white above. Self-conscious in the building’s silence, he walked past a rising staircase toward a descending one behind and beneath it and then walked down into an unlit basement with an unpainted cement floor. At the end of a row of three garbage cans, he knocked mistrustfully at a gray door that was not marked in any way. There was no answer, except for a faint stirring, as of a sleeper turning under bedclothes. He sensed the presence of a person. One shouldn’t be able to detect such a thing through a shut door, but usually one is able to. After a pause, he knocked again. More silence followed. Perhaps he had the day wrong. Then a small voice said, “Haló?”
Jacob identified himself but the speaker behind the door didn’t seem able to hear him. —Please, the speaker said in Czech. —It is open.
“Kaspar?” Jacob repeated, as he cautiously entered.
Beneath a shelf of detergents in jugs and faded boxes, a man was seated on the edge of an unfolded cot. He had evidently just raised himself; the sheets still held in their slow waves the hollow his body had formed in them. He was leaning on his hands, and he had the haggard, unfocused expression of someone who has been woken from deep sleep in the middle of the day, a look worsened, in his case, by his wandering left eye, over which he seemed for the moment to have lost all control. The mouth was hidden by wild beard, and the skin of the face was so loose that it seemed almost to tremble. He seemed to be smiling, but Jacob couldn’t tell whether it was a smile of recognition or merely of appeasement toward a stranger whose intentions he did not know. —There is no lock, Kaspar continued, still in Czech.
—Do you want still to sleep? Jacob asked.
—No, no. He shook his head with deliberate slowness, as if he felt dizzy and were taking pains not to make himself dizzier. He straightened his sweater, which had been pulled askew while he was unconscious.
As in the hallway outside, the concrete floor was raw. There was a drain in the center of it. Papers littered a card table, which seemed to serve as Kaspar’s desk. Above hung an unshaded bulb, but it had not been turned on. What light there was came instead from the street, through a small square of frosted glass high in the room’s far wall. This window faced east; since it was midafternoon, the light through the window was gentle and bluish. Beneath it, brooms, mops, shovels, and a hoe leaned against the wall. A dustpan and a pink cleaning rag hung on hooks. In a corner stood a steel slop sink, stained with the dried spatter of white paint.
“Welcome,” said Kaspar, now in English. He seemed to have collected himself enough to place Jacob.
“Melinda asked me to bring you this,” Jacob said, holding out the casserole.
“Ah, she is too good.” He indicated the card table: “Please.”
“Shouldn’t I put it in the refrigerator for you?”
“Didn’t you see my refrigerator?” He pointed. On the sill of the high window, Jacob now noticed a jar of pickled cabbage, a crumpled foil of butter, and a milk jug. “It is nicely cool. It does not freeze.” Proud of his resourcefulness, he chuckled faintly. He fit his stocking feet into a pair of sandals beside his cot and stood to clear a place for the casserole on his desk. “But I shall eat this soon. Would you like some?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. You go ahead.”
“I shall wait. For now I have the pleasure of your company. Sit, sit.” He returned to the edge of his bed and gestured toward the only other seat in the room, an aluminum folding chair.
Though he had made the comparison in a moment of anger, Jacob had not been wrong in likening Kaspar’s face to an animal’s. There was no cunning in it, only an earnest attention, a kind of hunger. When he had imagined this visit, Jacob had foreseen the pleasure of atoning for his insult, which, because it had remained unspoken, Kaspar had never heard, but now that he was in Kaspar’s presence, he was reminded of the assumption of deeper involvement that Kaspar made, as a matter of natural right, when anyone was in conversation with him. Faced with the evidence of Kaspar’s illness and poverty, Jacob feared Kaspar’s familiarity not as an intrusion but because he sensed that he might later be forced, for reasons he couldn’t yet name, to disappoint it.
“Perhaps I should go,” Jacob said.
“As you like.”
“If you need to sleep.”
“I don’t think I need sleep any more today. Stay, tell me of yourself.”
Jacob took the chair. “I brought you something, too,” he added, remembering the currants.
—This is delightful, Kaspar said in appreciation, thrown momentarily back into Czech by his reading of the label. But he resumed in English. “I shall ask my landlady to make a roll for breakfast.”
“Do you really pay rent here?”
“I teach German to the porter. This is her workroom, and she has pity on me. I am a Prince Myshkin for her, as you say.”
&nb
sp; “I never said you were Prince Myshkin.”
“She has a great respect for books and those who work with books, because she is Jewish.”
At the baldness of the assertion, Jacob took in a deep breath.
“Is it not true?” Kaspar asked.
“In America no one would say it like that.”
“But it is because the Jews have such a respect that I have a room. I must say it,” he insisted.
“Could you live in the , with Annie and Thom?”
“But I am well here! It is near to hospital. I have four blankets. And the porter cooks such nice dishes. She worries for me; she has no children.” A look of contentment came over his face. “I say to her that I have translated a page on the strength of her soup, and she is pleased. Will you have tea?” Kaspar took an electric pot from a shelf of hardware and filled it at the sink. With a tiny spoon, he measured out tea leaves. “This, too, is her gift.”
The porter’s generosity brought to mind Melinda’s, and for a few minutes the two men competed in praising her. Jacob wondered if there were anything romantic in Kaspar’s gratitude. It had the strength of a child’s dependence. But of course they all relied on Melinda so much, even those who relied on her merely to keep them in her mind.
“She is like a gardener,” Kaspar said.
“But maybe she thinks too little of herself,” Jacob suggested.
“Oh yes,” Kaspar at once agreed. “She has not altogether become herself.” He said this, too, as if it laid him under no obligation. “She has not yet found her fate.”
“Is her fate with Rafe?” Jacob asked.
The German seemed taken aback. “It is not for me to say.” An awkwardness hung in the air. “Perhaps I mean to say she has not found her ambition, rather than her fate,” he continued. “So it is with my writer, the one I am translating.”
Jacob nodded absently.
“I gave you his book,” Kaspar reminded him.
Jacob had forgotten. He apologized for not yet having started to read it.
Kaspar didn’t seem to have expected Jacob to. “My writer, too, was concerned rather with the fates of others,” he went on. “Il lui fallait cultiver les jardins d’autrui.” He spoke the French words as if with pebbles in his mouth, the way Germans do.
“What did he write?” Jacob asked.
“Poems, but I translate his letters.”
“To whom?”
“Do you know the surrealists?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“You have heard of them as a joke,” Kaspar inferred. “That is the way. A joke that is not funny. They are of course failures, for they make believe to take the side of the machine against man. To take the side of chance.” He paused and shakily poured the tea. “And yet it is not so. They are not truly on that side. In truth they make a protest. They are saying that so little humanity is left to them, it is as if all were chance. But they never admit that it is a protest. It is to be such a game, which they have already lost but they are pretending that they cannot lose.”
“They mean to lose,” Jacob said, to see if he understood.
“They cannot win, rather. They take the side against the human, in a spite without malice.”
He was smiling and stroking one side of his beard meditatively. He looked so satisfied with the pleasure of talking that to Jacob it almost seemed indecent, and something in him wanted to object. “What did the Communists think of them?” Jacob asked.
“Ah, that is good,” sighed Kaspar, acknowledging the touch. “Some are taken in, in early years. And later, in revenge, they say that surrealism is despair. But it is not despair. It is a game that only a young man can play, a young man in health, in lust as we say in German, because of the animal in him, which has not yet given up.
“My writer is the friend of these men. He is a Czech in Paris, the foreign correspondent of Lidové noviny. Do you know it? The great newspaper. And he falls in love with them. That is to say, he falls in love with their animals—with the instinct of their art but not the idea of it. For he himself has no wish to be modern. He is a man of the nineteenth century. And so he understands their game and disbelieves in it, while yet loving it. And therefore he can say what it is.”
While Kaspar had been speaking, he had held his eyes on Jacob fixedly, and they had shone so excitedly that Jacob had once or twice wished he could look away. He hadn’t looked away; he had been afraid it wouldn’t have been polite to. But now, as if Kaspar had detected Jacob’s discomfort, Kaspar dropped his gaze and paused. He hunched forward, bobbing slightly, and said, “Yes, yes,” into the air in front of him, in the voice that he must have used when alone, when talking to himself. He seemed for a moment to forget Jacob’s presence. But then he cast Jacob a glance and resumed: “I translate his love letters, written from Prague to those he knew in Paris.”
“He was literally in love with them? He was gay?”
“If you like,” Kaspar replied, indifferently.
“Did they know before he wrote? What did they say when they found out?”
“His letters were for them a sign of the cruelty of the world. They welcomed them, but they could not answer, in their philosophy.”
“They never wrote back.”
“They wrote back, but they could not answer. Perhaps I do not have the right word…”
“No, I understand.”
“It was a thing of chance for them. And so he continued to write. The letters are very painful and very beautiful.”
Jacob silently considered translating Kaspar’s writer into English some day. “Are you making good progress?” Jacob asked.
“It is in its way helpful to be sick. I don’t know if I could else finish the translation, it pays so little.”
Jacob remembered the days he himself had spent in bed reading, but he said only, “You shouldn’t be sick.”
Kaspar shrugged away Jacob’s concern and changed the subject: “You have a new friend, Melinda says.”
“I knew him in America.”
“You are close.”
“Not so close.”
“But he lives with you?”
“I arranged for him to stay with me.”
“Is he too a writer?”
“I don’t know,” Jacob answered, but then he remembered what Annie had said. “Maybe he is.”
“And you, do you write of your friend?”
“Carl?”
“Is that his name? But I meant the young woman.”
“No,” Jacob lied. In fact he made notes some evenings, after Carl was in bed, but they hadn’t amounted to anything. He stared around Kaspar’s room, as if in search of another topic of conversation. “Perhaps I’d better go,” he ended.
“As you wish,” Kaspar accepted.
* * *
Carl learned that the Canadian embassy had set up a social hour for its citizens—a bar, really—on Thursday nights. He wanted to go, and so one Thursday, the friends met at Melinda’s apartment, Rafe still absent, and walked together to what Carl called the “Canadian club.”
It was in a coal-dusted cement building on Národní , a building that for some reason lay mostly empty. Its elaborate, arched mouth led in to a pasáž.
“It’s in here?” Jacob asked. Behind a crisscross metal barricade, fine dust had settled on the interior courtyard’s pavement like a light snow.
“No, upstairs, I think,” said Carl. He turned right and led them up an echoing staircase into the building proper. On the third floor, at a door through which they heard American rock music loudly played, he knocked. There was no answer, and after a polite interval, Carl himself opened the door.
A dull roar washed over them. They pushed their way into the crowd. A few desk lamps lit a bar; the rest was dim. “Oh my god,” Carl said. “We could be in Cleveland.”
“Do you like it, then?” asked Annie, yelling.
“It’s great,” Carl answered.
“And so he justifies every fear you ever had of him,” Meli
nda said to Jacob, a confidence she could only share by shouting directly in his ear.
“What’s that?” Carl asked.
“I was saying how considerate of you Americans to go to such lengths to share your culture with us.”
“What?”
Melinda repeated herself.
“But these are Canadians.”
“Canadians are subtle,” Jacob yelled. Melinda mimed enlightenment.
“A beer?” Thom offered, gamely, and they all nodded. Carl went with Thom to fetch them.
The drinkers around them seemed as heavy as they were loud, though it may have been the thoughtless certainty with which they held their positions against traffic that gave the impression of weight. Since there was no coatroom, many of the men were wearing their coats despite the heat of the room, and many of the women were carrying theirs folded over their arms before their bellies, adding an impression of bulk to their figures. It almost seemed to Jacob that he and his friends were the only humans in a room full of heavy machinery. His friends fell silent; to make oneself understood required so much effort.
“It’s horrid,” Melinda shouted in his ear after a time. “Why did he bring us here?”
In the general blare, the undertones of her voice were lost, and since Jacob ordinarily depended on them to gauge her seriousness, he turned to search her face. To his surprise, she looked fragile. It occurred to him that surrounded by strangers, in a room where it was all but impossible to speak, she may have felt the loss of the weapons she was accustomed to fighting with. Even her personal beauty seemed muted, perhaps because it was not a habit with her to draw on that weapon consciously. Beside her, meanwhile, Annie had withdrawn into herself and was staring blindly into the buzzing air.
“It’s like an American bar,” Jacob answered, inadequately.
“We do have noise in London, you know,” Melinda replied. “And beer.”
