by Caleb Crain
Maybe Jacob would give up Carl’s bedroom after Carl left. Honza might want to rent it. As if cued by this unvoiced possibility, Honza, with a strange, silent, speed-walking gait, stole back into their rooms, darted through the kitchen, and vanished into the bathroom. Through the closed bathroom door, the friends heard him retching. Evidently the plumbing wasn’t fully operational yet on Honza’s side of the floor after all.
After a minute had gone by, Jacob tapped lightly on the bathroom door. Honza opened it quickly. —Silence, Honza whispered. —They’re outside.
—Do you want water? Jacob asked. —Milk? Bread?
—No, no, Honza answered. Despite his haste, he had thought to bring a comb, and he now wetted it under the faucet and combed his short hair. —But water, yeah. That will doctor me perhaps. If it isn’t a bother.
—Not at all, said Jacob.
Jacob brought Honza a glass of water and then packed his own satchel. He wished Honza luck. Before leaving, he mimed a warning that he was about to open the door. “See you, Carl,” he then added, audibly.
In the corridor outside, the Stehlíks were grouped around Honza’s door, waiting for Honza to emerge. The opening of Jacob’s door startled them. Standing with the Stehlíks was a tall, buxom woman in her thirties with dyed blond hair. Since the only hair dye regularly available in former Warsaw Pact nations was an unnatural henna, a bottle blonde was a woman with connections. Her clothes were loud, and she looked as if she was enjoying an enormous joke. The Stehlíks were dressed nicely—the women in white blouses and skirts, Mr. Stehlík in a thick-braided cardigan sweater—and their smiles were nervous. The service was going to take place at the offices of the District National Committee, explained.
—Have yourselves a pretty time, Jacob wished them.
—Definitely, with mocking gravity replied, answering for the group, who then turned away to stare again at Honza’s door.
* * *
Melinda caught Jacob on his way to the teacher’s lounge and pulled him into the unused shower where they smoked. He still felt light-headed from Honza’s moonshine.
“You handle your liquor so well,” she assured him. “You have the makings of a great alcoholic.”
“Except for that incident at the Jazz Club.”
“I’d forgotten. That is a spot on your record, isn’t it.”
Against the rules of the , Melinda had spent the night in Annie’s room. The two women had been yelled at the next morning by one of the house matrons—overnight guests were not allowed unless they had been registered twenty-four hours in advance—but Melinda had seen Annie through the worst of her anguish. In the sober light of morning, Annie felt sheepish about her attack on Jacob. By way of mending fences, she had thought of showing Jacob a new foreign-language bookstore in Wenceslas Square, which had just opened in a glass-front emporium vacated by some dying socialist agency or other. The store had hundreds of brand-new paperbacks in English—the whole thing seemed to have been arranged by a British publisher. She would be there at three that afternoon, if Jacob was willing to meet her.
When Jacob arrived, he found a classic First Republic shop that didn’t seem to have been altered since the 1930s. Three shop assistants in white aprons stood behind the counter, protected from visitors. The counter and the shelves behind the shop assistants were empty; the books lay flat on tables in the center of the store. There weren’t enough to cover the tables completely, but Jacob hadn’t seen so many English-language books for sale since Berlin. Greed made him light-headed. But the prices! In most Prague bookstores, prices were written in black ink on slips of cardboard, tucked into the books like bookmarks. There were no such bookmarks here, for some reason. Instead, when Jacob picked up a paperback Oliver Twist, he found a three-digit number penciled on the inside back cover. So many crowns could buy more than a dozen restaurant dinners—the cost of a single book was almost equivalent to a week of the salary that he had received when he worked full time at the language school. It was the London price, calculated at the official exchange rate with no discount. “You found it, did you,” Annie said upon arrival.
“It’s so expensive,” Jacob complained.
“Is it? Oh, I had been thinking you might like it here, you see.”
“I do like it,” Jacob said. He let himself open a Henry James novel. As he handled it, he sensed the unease of one of the shop assistants, who was watching him. It’s just a paperback, he thought scornfully.
“Gah, they are dear, aren’t they.”
They toured the room separately for a while. Jacob fell into a reverie of imaginary possession; he was visiting the books in his future library; they were prisoners he could not yet free. He settled on Morte d’Arthur. He could afford only the first volume, which cost half his share of a month’s rent, and then only if Annie could spot him two hundred crowns. He promised to repay her tomorrow out of the stash that he kept in his Bible.
“Ehm, we don’t have to talk about the other,” Annie said. “I don’t want to know, really.”
“Nothing happened. I said no.”
“It would be all right if you had said yes, but I wouldn’t want to know is all, you see.”
“Nothing happened.”
“He told me he was going to ask you, as if he and I were best mates, like.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not in love with him. Perhaps I do fancy him but what of it. I’m not in love.”
“Neither am I.”
“If I had thought you were, I shouldn’t have minded. Quite honestly. It was the waste of it that galled me. That, and that it was in poor taste, his telling me. Don’t you think it was?”
“He was going through something,” Jacob answered, feeling some loyalty to Henry, after all.
“I suppose.” She saw that she was still holding the Malory, which Jacob had given her to admire, and she handed it back to him. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you as I did. I do know that.”
“You were upset,” Jacob said.
“I would be miserable if we fell out over it.”
“We’re going to Krakow, aren’t we?”
“Are we? I didn’t like to ask.”
“Of course we are,” Jacob said.
“And Carl, too?”
“He doesn’t know about any of this.”
“Not very perceptive of him.”
“He was ‘pissed,’ as you call it. He only has a couple more weeks here, and he wants to see Krakow.”
Annie’s thoughts turned to the trip. “All of us with broken hearts,” she said, beginning to believe again that they would go. “Or breaking ones. I wouldn’t tell him, if I were you.”
“I’m not going to.”
“Not for my sake, mind you. It’s just that I don’t imagine Henry would wish for Carl to know.”
Jacob agreed.
“It is a flaw in my picture, isn’t it,” she continued, “that the one who broke my heart wanted to go to bed with you.”
“No, because it wouldn’t have meant anything if it had happened.”
“As men always say. But I won’t believe it. That would be worse somehow.”
* * *
The morning of their departure, it was warm enough to open a window, and into the heater-dried air of Jacob’s bedroom fell a column of spring’s breath, wet with melting snow and the rot of last year’s leaf mold. Carl was not yet awake, and Jacob stood for a while at the window. The touch of the breath was ambiguous, like teeth drawn lightly over skin.
Opening his large backpack, long unused, Jacob found three of his short-sleeved shirts, which he had stored there in November because they had collars and could not be worn as undershirts. A mustard paisley, a solid navy blue, and a field of orange-and-pink flowers. They reminded him of versions of himself that he had almost forgotten, less cautious and less retiring versions. He would be able to put them on again so long as he set about it with a measure of irony. He packed them along with a couple of long-sleeved shirts.
I
n the kitchen, as he drank his tea, he listened to water trickling through pipes to the other side of the house, where Honza and his bride were now established. He could feel but not quite hear the muffled percussion of their footfalls on carpet. Honza’s step was light, but his wife’s was resonant, though she wasn’t a heavy woman. Jacob was quickly getting used to hearing the slap of her slippers on the cement stairs, going to and from the Stehlíks’ shower every other evening. Mr. Stehlík had determined that the plumber and his wife were to share his family’s shower rather than Jacob and Carl’s. no longer borrowed the occasional shower from them either, and Jacob imagined that the scheduling upstairs must have become fairly martial. had promised to look in on Václav while they were away, but Jacob now put down extra food and water in his cage just in case.
“Are you psyched?” Carl asked, after he had showered and dressed. He slumped his backpack on the floor next to the pantry.
“I hope Annie doesn’t have unreasonable expectations.”
“You patched up your little tiff, didn’t you?”
“Oh yeah,” Jacob said. “It’s just, I don’t want her to be disappointed.”
“When the geographic cure doesn’t take.”
“Something like that.”
“I think she knows it’s just a weekend,” Carl said. “Anyway, it’s supposed to be scenic.”
“Auschwitz?”
“Renowned for the charm of its architecture. I thought we weren’t going there.”
“I don’t know. Annie really wants to.”
They had agreed to meet her at the central post office on , a block from Wenceslas Square, where Annie wanted to check the poste restante once more before they left town. The building, a late Hapsburg monument, stolid and practical, sat close to the street, and its entrance was so narrow and so heavily trafficked that it was only after entering that one arrived at a sense of it. As in a fairy tale, the cavernous central hall, once one stood inside, seemed larger than the palace that contained it. Strangers who had walked in at one’s side fell away; the echoing marble floor emptied. Street lamps lit the hall with yellow rays that cut into blue shadows, flattening what they exposed, reversing day for night as well as inside for outside. And far above, in obscurity, hung a dead skylight, whose dust-colored panes had been boarded over on the outside, no doubt long ago. Indented from the far wall, a wooden frame rose a few yards into the air. It held the service windows. It left undivided the bulk of the dim, unlit volume above, the way a rood screen, pointing upward, leaves the core of a cathedral intact. The room was too large to heat, and Jacob and Carl found Annie, tiny at the foot of a wall, blowing into the fingers of her knitted gloves.
“If it’s any trouble, I can come back Friday week, I don’t mind,” Annie offered. “It’s just that come the end of the month, they move the old letters into a cabinet, and I haven’t stopped in for weeks now. It’s miserable to have to ask the paní there to check the cabinet. She has a sigh that stops your heart.”
“We’ll all check, then,” Carl suggested.
They waited together, silenced and made nervous by the hall’s artificial dusk. To their surprise, both Carl and Annie had letters waiting. Annie’s was from Berlin. She said she would read it later, in the car, because it was bound to be bad news. “Anyone with good news would know to write me at the .”
Carl’s was from Boston. “Oh, this woman I went on a few dates with.”
“You haven’t mentioned her before,” said Jacob. He felt jealous of Carl for having a social world in America to go back to. In recent letters, his own friends had let him know that they were scattering. Daniel was reported to have taken a job as an editor in Washington.
“No, well.”
“You sound quite Czech when you say that,” Annie commented.
“No jo,” Carl clowned. The Czech phrase was a melancholy way of admitting to something.
They rode the subway north to Holešovice, a neighborhood of soot-stained brick workers’ residences from the late nineteenth century, coarse and unremarkable. They walked the perimeter of the neighborhood’s train station, where new tricolor billboards amalgamated the flags of Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Great Britain in order to suggest that expatriates gambled in a nearby casino. There were also several signs for massage parlors. The rental-car agency was in the corner of a bus station behind the train station; it borrowed parking space that the buses didn’t use. A young woman and a young man, who seemed to be sister and brother, checked a car out to them. Unexpectedly, the paperwork was brief.
“My god, they trust us,” Carl crowed, as soon as they were inside the car, a white compact Škoda with black seats.
Annie excitedly hushed him.
“Did we even give them a credit card?”
“They have the numbers of our long-stay visas,” Annie said. “And the address of Jacob’s and my employer.”
“But this car is worth, what, as much as the two of you would make in five years? And there’s no collateral. They gave us the collateral.”
“We’re driving capital,” Jacob said. He was taking the first turn behind the wheel. He started the ignition and eased it into the street. “In order to jump-start capitalism, they have to give the capital away.”
“For goodness’ sake it’s a Škoda,” Annie said. She waved responsibly through the near windshield to the brother and sister. “Na shledanou!” she said brightly but no doubt too quietly for the proprietors to hear through the glass and the now-growing distance.
“What if we sell it?” Carl asked.
“We will do no such thing,” said Annie.
“But we’re going to Poland.”
“Perhaps we shall sell it, then, if you’re so keen. For blue jeans and what not.”
“Excellent.”
Prague’s one-way streets soon turned the friends around, and they had to pull over and consult their maps. Jacob had brought two: a large green one of Czechoslovakia’s countryside, and a large orange-and-purple one of Poland’s. Across his lap, Carl unfolded them, as well as Jacob’s blue city map, which from long wear in Jacob’s back pocket was now softly disintegrating into tall strips. By comparison of the unwieldy, loud-wrinkling layers, they plotted a course. With Carl navigating, they crossed a bridge, drove down the hill where Jacob and Annie’s language school stood, and then turned east, along the tram tracks that Jacob and Carl rode home every evening. They passed the hospital Jacob had visited. Half a block from the Stehlíks’, they reached the highway, and in a few minutes, the last panelák was behind them and abruptly they were among cultivated fields, methodically furrowed and just beginning to sprout pale green.
Jacob cracked his window. Annie, in the back seat, took out her letter, and Carl, without saying anything, took out his. They were getting away with driving a car to Krakow, unwatched, unregulated. Jacob had the company of Carl and Annie, his ironic friend and his earnest one, and the three of them had the solidarity of their mistreatment by the god of love. The highway was for the most part empty; between villages it was so empty that they might have been the last people still living in the world. The only challenge was not to drive so fast that the curves became unsafe; there was no one to hit or be hit by. Maybe he wanted nothing more than to be away for a little while from the burden of living in another country, to return to the insouciance of merely visiting, of mere tourism; maybe he wanted to slip away for a while from the inchoate duty he had set himself of finding the spirit of change, if that was indeed the name of the spirit he was pursuing.
A few hours outside Prague, the three climbed into a massive concrete hammer and sickle that they found beside the highway, a memorial to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Hitler, and Carl took snapshots. When they took a wrong turn near the border, they were frightened by a smoggy valley, where fire spouted from black chimneys and long milky puddles lay like mirrors in a landscape of pale, clean-looking clay, free of life.
* * *
A few days later, in Krakow’s main square, the
afternoon was mild and Jacob offered to pay the cover at an outdoor café. He owed his friends a treat for the day before. He had started off well at Auschwitz, but at Birkenau he hadn’t been willing to get out of the car.
They chose a table with a parasol, which sheltered their faces but let the sun fall on their hands. To read the menu, Annie perched her sunglasses in her hair. They were in sight of the basilica and grand stone market hall. Though the aura of Krakow was medieval, the city was full of young people—students at its university and seminary. Jacob wondered when the Communists in Poland had so relaxed as to allow a seminary. From the glimpses the friends had had, as they passed the seminary’s plain yellow buildings, the solemn older gentlemen in robes and the teenage pupils with lowered eyes seemed well established in their forms, as if the seminary had been running for years, but perhaps they only seemed that way to outsiders; maybe the men had found refuge behind the walls as recently as last year. The city’s university students showed no such formality, of course, in their dress and manners. Many of the clothes they wore were new to Jacob. The buses, garbage cans, and many canned goods in Krakow were identical to Prague’s, but the market economy had touched young people’s wardrobes. A few even wore T-shirts with English-language mottoes boasting about the city’s university. In Prague, too, such T-shirts existed, but only tourists bought or wore them. For some reason Czechs never wore T-shirts as outer garments.
Carl’s voice interrupted Jacob’s thoughts: “I thought it would be easier in Krakow to be away from Melinda. Can I say that?”
“You can say anything,” Jacob assured him.
“I can, can’t I,” Carl said, “because I’m going home soon. I have to take advantage of irresponsibility while I still can.”
Jacob looked back out into the open square. “Have you met your quota? Have you been irresponsible enough?”
“To last a lifetime.”
“I don’t know. People had expectations.”
“I never live up to expectations. That’s my charm.”
“May I ask,” said Annie, “why you thought it would be easier?”
