by Caleb Crain
And what—again—was the thing she had learned? It had to be a kind of knowledge that one could come to about oneself.…Here his reasoning, such as it was, again broke off, because he looked up and was distracted by the observation that he had been left alone. Carl was playing pool with Thom in the next room. The women were talking to each other in the corner, guarding the men’s coats and bags and ignoring Hans beside them. At the bar, to Jacob’s right, Henry was saying something in demotic Czech to a burly man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, who was laughing at him. Jacob’s friends were all near, but Jacob was on his own.
He fell again into the game of thinking about time. A year ago he had been in America, he recited to himself; two years ago he had been straight. Where would he be a year from now? It was a melodramatic question but he was young and he liked the way it singled him out. It froze the scene around him into a tableau, comparable with other tableaux, remembered or projected, as if he were in motion and it wasn’t—or as if he were changeless while it changed.
“Do you ever think,” he asked Henry, who was nearest, “a year ago I was here, and now I’m here?”
“Yes,” Henry answered, turning away from the Czech man beside him.
“And will it always be like that?”
“Will you always be wandering?”
“I guess. I mean, will there always be that break?”
“That break?”
“You’re free but you’re cut free.” Tonight the freedom excited him, like an engine that revs fiercely because it has been cut loose from what it was towing.
“Your roguery,” said Henry, seeming by his look to catch the feeling that had come over Jacob.
“Mine? Maybe.”
“Your American liberty.”
“Is that it?”
“There’s something else, isn’t there, something against it. To keep us here on the eve of beauty.” Henry’s eyes were suddenly strange. “To keep us here on the eve of beauty,” he repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“A phrase in me head. Does that happen to you ever? A phrase runs through my head, and I decide to say it aloud.” Henry had gone stiff with energy, the way little Prokop had during the marketing game. He was quivering; he was holding himself in place willfully, like a hummingbird.
“Sometimes,” Jacob said.
“I suppose it’s how one writes,” Henry said. “By abandonment.”
“Really?” Jacob was cautious.
“By ecstasy.” He said it as if he were tempting Jacob, who didn’t know what to make of what he said, or the tone in which he said it. It wasn’t how Jacob did his writing.
“I want to—,” Henry began to say, but without finishing, he walked off to the pool table. It was as if they had been swimming. If one tries to talk while dog-paddling, breathing sometimes becomes more urgent than talking and the conversation is broken off, and it isn’t to be understood as rudeness.
In the corner, Jacob challenged himself to sit down beside Hans. “How are you?” Jacob said, a little too loudly.
Hans appraised him. Jacob watched the movements of the blue eyes studying him. “Well, thank you,” Hans answered.
“You’re from…Denmark, aren’t you?” Jacob asked.
Hans’s nationality was a fact already established between them, and Jacob was surprised to hear himself speaking about it as if he didn’t remember. Perhaps he wanted to pretend that he didn’t remember much about his earlier conversation with Hans. Or perhaps he thought he would be safer if Hans took him for the kind of American whom it would be a waste of time to be disappointed in. “Yes,” Hans answered carefully. He seemed to be afraid that he had a drunk on his hands.
“Kierkegaard was Danish, wasn’t he?”
“Are you a partisan of his?”
“I’ve only read a little.”
“Too Christian for me.”
Golden hair on marble skin—Hans was like a sugar cookie, Jacob thought. “I had a friend who was very Christian,” Jacob explained. “Almost mystical. So the way Kierkegaard thinks it all through.…” It had been a small triumph for Jacob. Daniel had wanted to hear more and in the end had taken one of Jacob’s paperbacks, thereby acknowledging that it was Jacob for once who had discovered something they could share.
“Was this your friend who…?”
“No, she had been Christian, kind of an extreme denomination, but she wasn’t any more, when I knew her. I guess she was in what Kierkegaard would have called despair, which he considers an improvement over not being in despair, but still.” He was trying to charm Hans as he had charmed Daniel.
“It is usually Andersen whom people ask after.”
“Who?”
“The writer of fairy tales. He also was a strange one.”
A strange one. A queer, he meant. “What a funny pantheon,” Jacob said.
Hans grimaced, to communicate that the insult wasn’t new to him. A Marxist was supposed to be superior to national heroics, but as a child, someone like Hans must have read about heroes, or he would not have grown up with the ambition to save the poor and overthrow tyrants.
“Did you ever read—I read this book as a child, a sort of fairy tale, and I’ve never been able to remember the title of it,” Jacob said. “About two boys who die and go to another world, a beautiful valley. But there’s a war in the valley, and at the end of the book they die again, and go to yet another world. I remember thinking as I read it, I can’t tell my parents, or they’ll take it away from me.”
Hans looked at him oddly; he had gone still. “It isn’t Danish,” he said slowly. “It is by a Swedish author.” He hesitated, as if he were afraid despite Jacob’s confession that Jacob was still playing the role of drunk American and might mock him or the book. “It is called Bröderna Lejonhjärta,” he said at last.
“The Brothers Lionheart,” Jacob echoed.
“Yes.” Love for the book lay suddenly between them, an awkward intimacy.
“What was it about?” Jacob said. “It was a strange story.”
“Yes, very strange,” Hans agreed.
“At the time I felt I shouldn’t talk about it.”
“It is perhaps, because, do you remember, in order to reach the other world, they…”
“Oh, that’s right,” Jacob said, recalling. The two boys jump together to their deaths, so as not to be parted.
The roar of talk in the bar continued for a little while without Jacob or Hans. “I suppose perhaps it is that,” Hans said.
“It was a lovely book,” Jacob declared, to commit himself.
Hans agreed. Their enemy was the idea that such a book shouldn’t fall into the hands of children. Jacob hadn’t expect to form a bond of any kind with Hans, let alone this one, but there was nothing that either of them could do about it now. They sat together silently. Annie rose to fetch another round. Together they watched her cross the room, and they watched her at the bar as several times she composed herself in preparation for addressing the barman, pressing forward on tiptoes, only to be ignored by him and sink back onto her heels. Henry left the pool players, apparently to assist her, and they watched him signal to the bartender with a practiced flip of two fingers of his right hand and then confer with Annie about the order. As the small dumb show seemed to end, Hans and Jacob looked down together at the unfinished beers between them. Jacob wondered if it was part of the charm of their circle that the name of the book had been given back to him. Or maybe it was just Hans; maybe it was Hans’s nature as a missionary, as a believer, that had called up Jacob’s memory of the book. And maybe that was the cause of the awkwardness that they were now sitting in. They had both loved the book, but Jacob must have loved it because he had recognized in it a story about his own nature (because Jacob had no brother, the idea of a brother was just a metaphor to him). Hans, however, didn’t have that nature. Jacob had heard him boast about women the same way he boasted about his paramilitary adventures—with enthusiasm, callousness, and an indeterminable amount of fictio
n.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourself, anyway,” came abruptly Annie’s voice, addressing Jacob in sharp tones. She was standing over them, though they hadn’t seen her approach. “You must be quite pleased, I fancy. I might have known, is the thing. Given what you are.”
“What?” Jacob asked.
“Oh, don’t pretend. Not to me. Sod off. As it were.”
She turned and strode away, across the room, past the bar, up the stairs.
“What was that about?” Jacob asked.
“I ought to go to her,” Melinda said. She began to gather her things into her purse.
Thom and Carl, as their pool game was ending, had noticed Annie’s departure and now came over. “Is something troubling Annie?” Thom asked.
“She made the most astonishing speech,” Hans declared. “To Jacob, about ‘what he is.’”
“I suspect it’s to do with Henry, somehow,” said Melinda, swinging on her coat.
“Is she on about that again,” Thom replied.
“I don’t see how it could be Henry,” Hans said. He was enjoying his role as witness; Jacob wished he would be quiet. “She was angry quite particularly with Jacob.”
“Does she think you said something to Henry?” Carl suggested.
“I didn’t.”
Jacob followed Melinda across the room unthinkingly. At the foot of the stairs Melinda turned and put a palm on his forearm. “I recommend you let me sound her a bit first.”
He stopped halfway back, at the bar, where Henry was standing. “Annie’s furious at me,” he told Henry.
“Is she?” Henry didn’t seem to care. “I have a question to ask you.”
“Okay,” Jacob agreed. He was willing to be distracted.
“Do you fancy me?”
Jacob’s first thought was that he had to be careful. “What do you mean?” He looked from one of Henry’s wild eyes to the other. He saw that Henry was still shivering and taut with strange energy.
“Would you fancy a shag?”
“Is that like a scrum?”
“It could be.”
“I’m learning all the words,” Jacob said. None of what was between any of them was going to last, he saw, and this was the way the loss was dawning on them.
“If not, I know how it is.” As a gentleman, Henry was careful to leave Jacob a way to refuse him.
“Did you say anything to Annie?” it occurred to Jacob to ask.
“I may have done.”
“She’s upset.”
“Is she? Oh, I see.”
There was a reproof in Henry’s casual cruelty. If he and Jacob were to be lovers, then as lovers they shouldn’t reckon the consequences. The principle in his unconcern amounted almost to chivalry. Jacob, however, couldn’t help knowing that if he went to bed with Henry, Annie would never speak to him again. Still, he thought he was able to meet Henry on his ground—he thought that if he refused Henry, he would not be conscious of giving anything up, of making any sacrifice. There had been no touch between him and Henry, no feeling of overture. Jacob imagined that in bed Henry would be violent, not because he would want to hurt Jacob but because violence would belong to his idea of what it was, of what the thing was that he thought that he wanted with Jacob—the idea of working against the part of his nature that wanted to feel itself brought home. Henry was straight—even straighter than Carl, in Jacob’s estimation. It was the being wanted for the sake of the impossibility that Jacob objected to.
“I don’t think so,” Jacob said.
“No, I thought as much,” Henry said. “It’s like that, isn’t it. Either you’re interested or you’re not, if you’re a bloke.”
Having said no, Jacob could no longer see a reason for his refusal. They were all going to lose one another.
Melinda came quickly down the stairs, and as Jacob turned to hear her news, Henry excused himself.
“I’m taking Annie to the ,” Melinda said. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“I said to Henry the other day I thought you’d be good for a snog. How was I to know that he would consult Annie of all people?”
“A what?”
“Jesus. ‘Kissing.’ How you Americans can bear to speak with such shameless clarity.…I should have thought of Annie but I didn’t.”
It was painful, as Carl, Thom, and Jacob left the building, to have to walk past Annie, who had not been able to bring herself to leave, despite Melinda’s coaxing, but was twisting against a brick wall outside.
“She’s in a bad way,” said Thom. “I hope it’s no more than a broken heart.”
Not having anyone had been Jacob’s way of keeping them all—it had been five months, he realized, since he had gone to bed with anyone—and now he was losing them anyway, without being ready to. As the tram pulled away, he could not help but watch Annie through the window. She was still twisting restlessly, though now in Melinda’s arms.
* * *
The next morning, Jacob heard voices; someone was in Carl’s room. With a sturdy knock, the person strode into Jacob’s, and Jacob fumblingly armed himself with his glasses. It was Honza, the plumber. He held a bottle without a label; shot glasses thimbled his fingers. His shirt was unbuttoned, exposing a modest pot belly; beneath that, he was wearing a sagging, yellowing pair of underwear and gray socks. A disheveled elf. He must have crept in the back way, through the door that communicated between their rooms and his.
—You must toast me, the plumber said, pouring a clear liquid and approaching Jacob, who propped himself up in his makeshift bed and accepted the drink helplessly. —I am ———, Honza said. Jacob didn’t recognize the verb. The root was the word for “woman”; the form was reflexive. Turning into a woman? Honza’s eyes were red and rheumy; he had evidently been drinking all night. He was nodding at Jacob with a somewhat desperate smile.
—You are…, Jacob echoed, puzzledly.
—Today is wedding, Honza said.
—You’re getting married, Jacob at last understood. He was taking a woman. —And what is this? Jacob asked, raising his glass.
—It is homemade.
—I already have a hangover, Jacob objected.
—So for you it is all one! Honza encouraged.
Jacob drank.
“It’s Everclear,” said Carl, from the doorway, wearing his blanket and holding an empty glass. “Homemade Everclear. We’ve been poisoned.” To Honza, he added, cheerily, “It’s great! Congratulations!”
Honza eagerly refilled Carl’s glass, his own, and Jacob’s. “Oh god,” Carl groaned. “Not again, no, please.”
Honza was chattering manically, faster than Jacob could altogether understand. He was getting married, no man should do such a thing without drinking himself blind, it was the duty of comrades to become equally drunk. The still that he had inherited from his mother was the most potent in Moravia, and it was always a treat to have a taste of such a liquor, at any hour of the day or night.
Jacob compliantly raised his glass a second time but only pretended to sip. Carl tried the same ruse.
—No, no, boys! Honza protested. —Drink it all at once, so it smashes you.
—I’m drinking, Jacob lied. He had to teach at the language school in a couple of hours.
—Honza, where’d you go? a woman’s voice called from the room at the other end of the floor. Jacob hadn’t realized that the plumbing there now ran well enough for a woman to spend the night, or that Mr. Stehlík had been willing to grant Honza permission to have a woman there. Of course, if Honza were marrying today, Mr. Stehlík could hardly forbid him his bride-to-be. —Honza, where are you? the woman called again.
“You’re in trouble now,” said Carl.
—I’m with the boys! I’m coming! caroled Honza. Then he pointed to the ceiling and grimaced, abashed and entertained by the thought that his bride’s questions and his own answers might have been audible to the Stehlíks. He shrugged and padded back to his room.
“So much for today,” Carl said.
Because Carl had no plans, he ceded the shower to Jacob. In the bathroom, after Jacob had stripped, he hunched over the tub, waiting for the water to warm before he plugged the drain. Because of his nakedness and his awkward posture, he was acutely aware of the jitters that Honza’s liquor, coming on top of his hangover, had given him. His toes were so numb from the cold tiles that as he stepped gingerly into the tub he could not at first gauge the temperature of the water. He crouched, pointing the nozzle at his toes, which reddened in the heat. Then he held the nozzle over a shoulder so that the water fell on the nape of his neck, where, he had once read, young animals find it soothing to be seized, because their parents hold them by it in the wild. He made an effort to relax into the loss of control that the drink had forced on him. He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t think Henry would want to talk about what had happened between them, but he would have to talk about it with Annie.
The rooms were still cold, and Jacob dressed quickly. Still draped in his blanket, Carl sat reading an old magazine at the kitchen table, and Jacob set out two plates, the foil of butter, and a jar of apricot preserves. Their store of rohlíky had staled, but they were still soft enough to be torn open. Jacob brewed tea.
“What are you going to do today?” Jacob asked.
Carl shrugged. “Be in Prague.”
“What does that entail lately?”
Carl looked at Jacob apologetically. “It’s so trite.”
“What is?”
“I go to places we went together. Yesterday I went to Vyšehrad. Don’t tell her, please.”
“I won’t.”
“There’s still snow under the trees up there. I’ll forget her once I’m back in America.”
Jacob didn’t reply.
“I only have a few more weeks here,” Carl added. “I think about that when I’m tempted to break form.”
