by Caleb Crain
“Maybe he’s hiding,” Jacob suggested. It was awkward to think out loud at such a volume.
“There’s such a thing as excess of caution.”
“Do I look so miserable?” Annie asked. She had been trying to read their lips.
“We weren’t discussing you, darling,” Melinda responded.
“No? I was certain you were.” It seemed to please her to be disabused. “What were you on about, then?”
At this moment, Carl and Thom returned. “Bloody poofs here,” Thom swore, and Jacob froze for a second. “Drinking beer cold.”
“Thomas,” Melinda said, on account of his language.
“Out of their ‘icebox,’” Annie contributed, “though I quite like the word ‘icebox,’ as it happens.”
“Cheers,” Henry saluted, and they matched his salute.
“Are there any Czechs here?” Jacob asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be gathering in public.”
“No Czechs,” said Carl. “This place is a jihad magnet.”
The friends gave up talking for drinking. Jacob found it odd to see so many expatriates from North America and to know none of them. They appeared to be the sort who never stepped out of the context they traveled with. “Who are they all?” he asked Carl, who shrugged. Carl seemed to be making a show of his interest in them.
At last Henry announced, “I think perhaps it’s an early night for me.” It was only the end of the first round.
“For me as well,” Melinda at once concurred.
“I’m not to be left here,” Annie said with alarm.
The friends quickly found themselves in the corridor outside, where it was quiet and they could talk freely.
“Don’t let us drag you away,” Thom said to Carl.
“It was awful, wasn’t it,” Carl conceded.
“Jacob did warn us that you were a bounder,” Melinda continued. “What was the word. A rogue.”
“Melinda,” Jacob muttered.
“Can I at least walk you home?”
“Me?” asked Melinda. “It’s just three streets away.”
“Will no one walk me home?” Henry interjected.
“Poofters right and left,” Thom observed regretfully.
“I’ll walk you home, Henry,” Carl made believe. “But U is just around the corner, isn’t it?”
The group was relieved that Carl had thought of it. They descended to the avenue and turned into the wind, toward their old haunt. Henry and Carl led the way. When Annie stopped to fasten her coat and fell behind, Jacob dropped back to keep her company. He stamped his feet for warmth.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Is it true that all bars are like that in America?”
“I think so. I wouldn’t know as well as Carl.”
“Aren’t your kind like that as well?”
“I guess they are.”
“I don’t hold it against you. I don’t even hold it against Carl, really. He seems quite taken with Henry, doesn’t he,” she said, nodding ahead, and added, hypothetically, “You aren’t jealous.”
“Carl is free to have arguments about aesthetics with people besides me.”
At Na , they turned the corner that housed the gallery where Jacob and Luboš had seen the work of the children’s book illustrator. It was empty now, between shows. Jacob wondered what the next show would be. He noticed that he wasn’t sentimental. In fact he was disloyal, he told himself; he was careless. He didn’t point the gallery out to Annie, and he didn’t say anything about the cart man selling párky a block further on, where the avenue ended and the raised cobblestone paving kept out cars. After all, he and Annie were going to turn before they reached the cart. “I heard that your little club is to have a meeting,” Annie resumed. “The one with Henry.”
“On Wednesday night.”
“I suspect Henry’s quite a good writer. Otherwise I shouldn’t care to join, I don’t think. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t like to read your writing, and Carl’s too, if he would let me. But if it were just you and Carl, it would be your private thing, wouldn’t it, living together as you do.”
“Chastely.”
“I have your word for it. But Henry makes it a group.”
“Oh, Annie. Just come if you want to so badly.”
“But Henry doesn’t want it, you see. He as good as said as much.”
“Did he really?”
“In so many words. It wasn’t anything to do with me, he said. He would be embarrassed, because it’s rather blue, what he writes.”
“Blue?”
“Blue. Off. But I’m not a prude, so I’m not certain I believe him. I mean, don’t you think it’s no more than a piece of gentleness—something to put me off with? He is quite gentle, you know, in his way.”
It was too delicate for Jacob to meddle with. He didn’t want to have Annie excluded, but there seemed to have been a negotiation of some kind between her and Henry, and he hesitated to tamper with it.
Once inside the familiar warmth of U , the friends again teased Carl for having led them astray with the Canadians. “One brick of Semtex in there,” Carl joked in return, “and capitalism would never come to Czechoslovakia.”
“A whole brick wouldn’t be necessary,” said Henry. “You can cast it quite thin. That’s why it does so well for letter bombs.”
“And who told you all this, Henry?” Thom asked. “Your friend Hans?”
“One sheet of Semtex,” Carl modified.
“They power the detonator with the battery from a piece of Polaroid film.”
“Ingenious,” said Carl.
“I find it quite morbid, rather,” Annie objected.
“But I don’t see that it would stop capitalism,” Henry added.
“It would stop it here,” Carl claimed. “The thing about capitalism is, you have to be really nice to it. Really polite.” He glanced at Melinda, who was fingering a box of Petra cigarettes she had dropped on the table at her elbow, as if she were admiring the russet color of its cover. She looked up from time to time to let him catch her eye, and when she did, they could see that Carl was amusing her. She was letting him look at her a little longer and more often, Jacob thought, than she would have if Carl hadn’t made a false step earlier in the evening that he still had to atone for. “Otherwise it won’t roll over your country and destroy life as you know it,” Carl continued. “It’ll roll over someone else’s.”
“And why should capitalism be so sensitive to the fate of one of its nightclubs?” Melinda asked.
“It’s the people inside not the nightclub itself. They would ‘tell.’”
“‘Tell’?”
“‘You killed our infant bankers.’ ‘You made it hard for us to loan you money.’ ‘You failed to coddle the juggernaut.’ And it’s off to Poland, or Hungary.”
“Not bloody likely the Czechs would let that happen,” said Melinda.
“I don’t know,” said Carl, with comically exaggerated doubt.
“Coddle the juggernaut—I’ll have to remember that one,” Henry complimented Carl.
There was a bit more flourish in Carl’s silly talk than usual. He seemed to be laying it out for Melinda’s unacknowledged admiration, and perhaps comfort, like a coat over a puddle, to be taken for granted. It was as if the two of them had been more frightened than the others by Carl’s inattention and needed to reestablish their footing without seeming to be concerned to reestablish it with each other in particular, and were therefore forced into a nervous, general jollity.
“God, what was that all about,” Carl said at the end of the night, as he and Jacob walked down empty streets, which the snow fell into but never seemed to land in. In , beside the Lucerna pasáž, gated for the night, they waited for a tram.
“Don’t know.”
A young couple were flirting in half whispers on a stoop. A man with heavy gray hair stood beneath the enameled-steel tram sign, gripping a worn leather satchel, as rich in color as the wood of a violin, and staring dully past them dow
n the tracks. Jacob read the time of the next tram’s arrival off the placard; Prague trams always ran on schedule. “Eighteen minutes,” he told Carl.
“Would it be terrible if we took a cab?” There were three of the square, black cars at the corner, where met Wenceslas Square, the drivers talking as they leaned against their hoods, the engines idling for warmth. Carl continued: “What is it, fifty crowns?” Drivers were a distrusted caste, Jacob had learned from his students. Or rather, only the corrupt took taxis instead of public transportation, and drivers had necessarily taken some of the poison in handling them.
“It might be as much as a hundred,” Jacob said.
“So three dollars. Don’t look so horrified. For me it’s three dollars.”
“Okay,” Jacob consented.
“I’m a fucking tourist, okay?”
They negotiated a fare before they got in, and Jacob asked the driver to follow the track of the night tram that they would have taken, so that as they traveled he would be able to know where they were. The driver didn’t speak to them; perhaps he found Jacob’s request insulting. Carl, too, was silent, and Jacob watched the tram signs trundle past, unstopped at, with their white squares for the numbers of day trams and blue squares for the numbers of night ones. At this hour there was almost no one else on the roads, and scenes passed by so much faster than Jacob was accustomed to that he felt a vague anxiety, which he knew was groundless but couldn’t quite shake, like a sense in a dream that you are forgetting something important, or that you’re about to lose something. All the windows in all the buildings they passed were dark. Everyone in Prague went to bed so early, and Jacob and his friends had stayed out so late.
“What a prick I was,” Carl said when they were nearly home. He had the hood of his pullover up for warmth, and it blocked Jacob’s sight of him.
“You weren’t a prick.”
“I think I was trying not to care,” he continued. “But I couldn’t go through with it.”
* * *
The following Wednesday, Henry arrived after dinner with a sack of beers and, unexpectedly, Thom, who apologized for adding himself: “This one said he would be so lonely on the tramvaj, and I took pity on him.”
“You should write for us, too, man,” Carl invited Thom.
“Perhaps I shall, perhaps I shall…I’m willing to help out with the drink, in any case.”
Jacob had turned on all the lights in the kitchen, as if they had gathered for a matter of business, and a window was ajar to ventilate the smoke from their cigarettes, so it was bright and cold. For a while they chattered aimlessly. They had agreed to discuss only one story at each meeting, and no one was in a hurry to be the one to reveal himself tonight; no one wanted to seem eager to go first. When Thom asked if anyone else had seen Henry’s picture of his daughter, Frieda, they urged Henry to take the snapshot out of his wallet, and he was happy to, and they saw that she shared his natural grin and deep dimples, was blond, and held up a green pail of sand. In the little girl the force of Henry’s wide-set, outward-pushing eyes was softened and became beautiful. Jacob was made uneasy by the photo, though the girl looked so joyful and Henry so proud that he pretended he wasn’t. Earlier in the day, when Jacob had typed out some pages about Meredith, it had stirred up a childish and willful part of him, and it bothered him now that the picture suggested that Henry wasn’t wholly theirs; according to the photograph, a part of Henry belonged to a child playing on a sunny beach in northern Spain—he belonged to this girl in a way that could never be challenged. His fate wasn’t free for Jacob to dispose of, even in imagination, as Thom’s or Carl’s were—or Annie’s or Melinda’s or even Rafe’s—and the strange jealousy that this threw Jacob into puzzled him.
“We should, we should get started,” he said.
“She’s adorable,” Carl crowed. “She’s going to be trouble when she grows up.”
“Like her da,” Thom said.
Henry put away the photo, and gradually the members of the group allowed their easy talk to give way to the artificial purpose they had set for themselves. First they had to devise rules. Should they read silently, or aloud? Aloud. Would each read his own story? Yes. Who would start?
Carl raised his left palm, like a boy in a classroom. “I have a confession,” he said. “Um, I didn’t write anything.” As usual, he seemed to be inviting his friends to laugh, but since his confession put the purpose of the evening in jeopardy, they took it seriously.
“But a writer’s group was your idea,” Jacob protested.
“It was Henry’s idea! I only seconded the motion.” He looked from Jacob to Henry and back to Jacob again, and then pulled himself away from the table. “All right, I’m a disappointment.”
“No, no,” said Henry quickly. “We only want to be sure you have the same chance to make a fool of yourself that we do.”
“I see that it’s to be my fault,” Thom volunteered. “For lowering the tone.” The friends ignored his joke.
“I tried,” Carl said. Turning to Jacob: “Didn’t you hear me typing?”
“I did. So you must have something.”
“It’s too personal.”
“Mine is rather personal as well,” said Henry, as if he too were backing out.
“Mine isn’t personal about me,” Carl clarified. “I mean, it is, but that’s not what I mind about it. It’s personal about someone else.”
“A woman,” Henry suggested.
“I didn’t say that, did I?”
“I see,” said Henry.
“Do you fancy Melinda, then?” Thom said. No one spoke for a moment. “A right eejit I am tonight, as Annie would say. Trying to be clever. I had no idea.”
“Well, you had some idea,” Henry observed.
“She’s a fine one, Melinda is,” Thom continued, in sympathy.
“Indeed,” said Henry.
“If you could keep it to yourselves,” said Carl. “That could be one of our rules.” The others agreed. Only in consenting to this secrecy did it occur to Jacob that he wasn’t sure his own pages would make any sense to Henry or Thom unless he told them about himself, and that he wasn’t ready to do so. But a few moments later, he was spared a decision, when Henry, in order to take the spotlight off Carl, volunteered to read what he had written.
“I don’t mind being the goat,” Henry said, unfolding a typescript. He looked up to check their faces. “I’m just to read it?” he asked, and they reassured him. “Well, then,” he began.
Ezekiel
He was the architect of a malady. Of a milady, of a melody. He was a piston firing in a chamber, he was all the engine, and he saw a woman die and be reborn, and both sorts came to her through the prick that he thrust between her legs, that he tore her with. From the porch he strayed into the forest of broken glass set into the top of a wall around her, which he had always wanted to climb. A crowd of wolves were watching, janissaries whose teeth were their own lovers. Rooks flew out of a furnace and pecked the woman’s eyes and the man’s eyes, the wolves lapping the man’s blood and the woman’s blood. The man howled, too, and stones fell into a cavern like a building that was being unmade, a film in reverse. He became a fry-cook in a port city, where the thermometer stripped away even his undershirt. To his ecstasy contributed the jigsaw and the underside of her knee, the angry floodlight of a locomotive before it cut into a peach tree and savaged the stagnation of a hanging fern.
“Whoa,” Carl said in the following silence.
“Whoa?” Henry prompted, gingerly.
“That’s amazing,” Carl continued. “I think you have to read it again, though. It’s dense, man. Read it again.”
It seemed to Jacob that they were all keenly aware for the first time how dangerous Carl’s habitual irony might be in such a situation. But perhaps it only seemed that way to Jacob because Henry’s text had dismayed him and because it was in bad faith that he himself now said, “The metaphors are very rich.” He felt that the social context required him to settle the a
mbiguity in Carl’s tone but he was afraid he might instead be adding to it.
“I for one would enjoy a second hearing,” Thom said. He sounded earnest, and it may have been only to satisfy him that Henry proceeded to read the piece once more, this time more deliberately.
As Henry spoke the words again, Jacob found that he had as much trouble focusing his attention on them as he had had during their first reading. The images that were called up by the words distracted him. He seemed to see Henry’s hands bleeding, after he heard the narrator describe the jagged-topped wall, and he wondered what in real life had the capacity to hurt Henry so sharply, the gentle Henry, who explained the mysteries of Czech politics without calling attention to his knowledge, who drew out both the radical Hans and the conservative Rafe intelligently, without provoking an argument with either, yet who, if this story was to any extent the free association that it appeared to be, evidently imagined himself amid teeth and blood and hacksaws. He was violent inside, perhaps. The story was ending again, and Jacob still had no idea what to say.
“I like the image of the unbuilding of the building,” Carl said. “That’s really neat.”
Henry nodded, a little curtly. He turned his eyes, painfully open, toward Jacob, but Carl continued: “And the teeth of the wolves. That’s intense.”
Henry nodded again, beginning to make a game of his mute reactions. “Am I allowed to speak?” he asked.
“I think so,” Carl decided. “If you want to say something.”
“I ask as a point of information only,” Henry said. “I don’t have anything to say as yet.”
The room fell silent. Jacob tried in vain to remember a detail to praise. “Is the man at the beginning,” he asked, “the same as the one who becomes a sailor?”
“A sailor?” Henry wondered.
“A fry-cook,” Carl corrected.
“In a port city,” said Jacob. “That’s why I thought sailor.”
“Am I to answer now?” Henry asked. “It could be the same person. Or it could be different people even within the same sentence.”
The friends made an effort to accept this comment. “I thought it was the same guy,” Carl said. “Can I say that? I like there to be a story. I like it that you’re with the woman, and then you escape, and then you’re in Marseilles or wherever. The Hague.”
