by Caleb Crain
“If I can’t make up my mind,” Melinda explained, “he’ll put it off a little longer.”
“An offer came through,” Henry said. “For Kazakhstan. Land of the Cossacks!”
“Oh, they’re the same word. I didn’t realize that.”
“But different people, actually. It’s a Turkish word, it turns out,” Rafe elaborated. “It means ‘bohemian.’”
“No,” it was now Jacob’s turn to say.
“Well, it means ‘rover.’ The tribe who do not settle down.”
“Your tribe, in other words.”
“But Melinda’s not excited for some reason.”
“Do they have running hot water in Kazakhstan?” Jacob asked.
“Sometimes,” Rafe replied, as if that were as often as anyone had a right to wish for. He had the excitement of a boy looking forward to a math test that has scared all the other boys, not because he’s better at math but because he’s better at thinking while scared.
“Why can’t you save the world from an office in Paris?” asked Jacob.
“But I don’t save the world. I complicate it. Paris doesn’t need any help in that department.”
“I tried,” Jacob told Melinda.
“You tried valiantly,” Melinda agreed.
“You should come, too. You’d love Almaty in the spring. The scent of acetyls and aldehydes in the air—”
“Have you heard the news?” Melinda interrupted.
“What news is that?” Jacob asked.
“Thom and Jana’s.”
“No.”
“They’re to have a sprout,” Melinda revealed.
“So first you have a snog, and it leads to a scrum, and you end up with a sprout.”
“That’s the giniral idear, luv.”
“You do a terrible Cockney accent, for an Englishwoman,” Rafe told Melinda. “Do you know that?”
“It’s better than my cowboy. Jacob positively shudders when I do my cowboy.”
“Are they getting married?” Jacob asked.
“Provisionally,” said Melinda.
“To make sure the child has dual citizenship,” Henry explained. “They’re here, you know.”
“Where?”
“There’s another room,” Melinda said. “It’s sort of—well, you’ll see. And Annie and Kaspar as well. Shall we go in to them?”
She took Jacob’s arm and pointed him to an open door at the far end of the bar, across from where they had come in. She held him tightly enough to oblige him to walk slowly, to match the rhythm of her smaller, more leisurely steps. It was a ritual of the court, Jacob thought, that Melinda was the first to proceed. Rafe naturally took up the end of the train.
They passed into a short corridor. “I wish that I had gone to Krakow,” Melinda confided, leaning into Jacob, “and that you and he had stayed here.”
“Why?”
“Because then I would have that look in my eyes. That look of having gotten away.”
They emerged into the back of a small auditorium. The stage was dark and the chandeliers were dim, but from low sconces a yellow blur fell discreetly into the aisles, as if for latecomers who still had a few moments to find their way to their seats. It reminded Jacob that in the world outside, the sun had gone down for the night. Men and women leaned against the walls in conversation, or took up clusters of seats, standing or sitting crosswise on armrests so as to be able to look at one another rather than at the stage where nothing was taking place. Jacob and Melinda walked slowly down the ramp of the stage-left aisle, scanning the rows for their friends. Because the stalls obliged most people to face forward, and because of the obscure light, Jacob and Melinda had nearly reached the stage before they spotted Thom, in the front row. He had turned in his seat so as to be able to address Kaspar, who was sitting one row behind Thom, Jana, and Annie.
“Congratulations,” said Jacob, as he and Melinda filed into the gap between the front row and the proscenium. “Mazel tov,” he added for good measure.
“Why thank you, sir,” Thom responded. He and Jana rose to accept Jacob’s and Carl’s embraces.
“Boy or girl?”
“He is a boy,” said Jana, “and he will come in September.”
They all looked at one another stupidly and happily for a few moments. Jacob had never before been in the presence of friends his age who had announced a pregnancy, and the vague but powerful geniality that the couple gave off was a novelty to him. The aura was different from that of other achievements; it was more like one of greeting than of congratulation.
“You will pardon me,” a delicate voice said, “but I thought, that I heard you say, ‘Mazel tov.’ Is it so?”
“Kaspar, this is my friend Carl,” Jacob responded.
“Ah, the poet,” Kaspar said, bowing slightly.
“Poet?” Carl echoed.
“You direct what is called the poetry corner, do you not?” Kaspar asked, with a glance at Henry, his evident source.
“Oh it’s Henry’s poetry corner. I’m just an unindicted co-conspirator.”
“Now you’re in for it,” Rafe murmured.
“And what is this, if you please, an unindicted co-conspirator?” Kaspar asked, carefully repeating the syllables.
Kaspar had risen to his feet when the others did, and he now swayed slightly, holding on with his stubby fingers to the back of Jana’s chair for support. His clothes were so loose on him that half the collar of a polka dot shirt—another gift of Rafe’s?—had slipped beneath the neck of his sweater. One of his eyes was wandering as usual, and the inward-sloping, almond shape of his eyes, Jacob saw, contributed to the expression he seemed always to wear of appealing for the answer to a question.
“It’s a reference to our great leader Richard Nixon,” Carl explained. “It’s a way people had of referring to him during Watergate.”
“Carl’s a great one for the names of things,” said Henry, at Carl’s side. “It’s he who came up with ‘coddling the juggernaut.’”
“Ah yes,” said Kaspar. “That was very fine.” The fullness of the gratitude embarrassed Jacob on Kaspar’s behalf, but Carl let it go by. “But why do you call yourself so?” Kaspar persisted.
“Because I maintained plausible deniability. I never read any poetry to the boys here. Or any prose, for that matter.”
“Didn’t you?” Annie queried.
“We know he wrote something,” Jacob volunteered. “I heard him typing.”
“He is a bit ‘dissi,’ perhaps,” Kaspar suggested.
“Like dissident?”
“It is a style. Always joking. Always with secrets. Keeping your things in a bag, for if they come to knock in the night, and writing only for the drawer.”
“There’s nothing to dissent from in America,” Jacob said, rehearsing his old argument with Kaspar. “There’s just—other voters.”
“I bet you could find something,” Carl demurred.
“It alarms him, when I speak so,” Kaspar told Carl, conspiratorially.
“He’s not ready,” Carl agreed.
The group soon broke into smaller conversations. “She let me know in March,” Thom explained to Jacob and Carl. “It was her wish to have the child, a reasonable decision considering the lad’s attractive father, but it’s quite common here the other way. Bit of a shock to learn how common, even to a man of such a liberal mind-set as myself. Seems they’re much more likely here to take care afterward than to trouble themselves in any way before.”
“It’s thought to be an unintended side effect of the command economy,” said Henry. “No one compares costs. Sort of the way there’s a dry cleaner on every street but no Laundromats.”
“A weightier matter than that, I trust. It’s my scattered seed we’re discussing, as I believe your man Hans has called it.”
“No doubt some of that has made it to a Laundromat.”
“A pity that not even a father comes in for respect in the new world order. A father of his country, no less.”
“And of o
ther countries, too.”
“Just the one other, to the best of my knowledge.”
“And you’re going to get married?” Jacob asked.
“She’s quite stern. I had to promise to divorce her.”
“You promised?” Jacob asked.
“I had to. But I tell her she’s allowed to have second thoughts as she comes to a deeper appreciation of my merits.”
Jana turned in her seat at this.
“How well you know your mind,” Annie complimented Jana.
“But you have not said, how was your trip to Poland,” Jana replied.
“They’re quite jolly, the Poles, I find,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t you say? They want more and they give more, but it isn’t you that they want, not quite as it is here. You know how it is, that if you open a map on a Prague street, a Czech will appear to help you find your way and to talk to you for fifteen minutes. That didn’t happen in Krakow. On the other hand they were quite nice in the shops.”
“Oh, in shops we Czechs are barbarians,” Jana admitted.
“Not if one is a regular,” Annie qualified. “They’re quite fond of me in my Palmovka sweet shop, for example.”
“Because they know you,” Jana said. “You are theirs. But that is not yet civilization. It is only…family.”
“But in exchange perhaps one feels that it means more, somehow.”
“Still we must leave it behind,” Jana said.
Thom slid down beside her. Jacob clambered over two rows to sit behind Kaspar; Melinda and Carl came down the aisle and met him there. Rafe was already sitting beside Kaspar, rolling in his long fingers the foil wrapper from inside a cigarette pack, and Jacob wondered if it cost Rafe an effort not to turn around—not to examine the way Carl and Melinda sat down beside each other, behind him, and faced as carefully forward as he did.
After they had sat for a little while in the twilight together, Carl said, as if speaking a thought in all their minds, “It’s as if we’re waiting for the show to begin.”
“Don’t say that,” said Melinda. “In the next scene you leave us, you know.”
“That’s right, I guess.”
“What was it like to leave us for Krakow?” Melinda continued. “That was your rehearsal.” She said it brightly. Jacob thought he understood. If this was the last time she was going to see Carl, she had the right not to stint it.
“It was…,” he began, buoyantly enough, but he paused, and they waited with him, in the half dark, while he searched his memory and then his invention for something to say that was dishonest but not ungallant. “It was sort of beside the point. It was outside the story, as we say in the poetry corner.” The tone of the sentence was not quite right. “It made me wonder, what if the rest of my life will be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like tourism.”
“You would see the sights,” she consoled him.
“I suppose I would try to.”
She hesitated. “Would you miss us as much as all that?”
Without looking up, Rafe suddenly, quietly attacked her. “Do you want him? Do you want him so badly? Is he going to give it to you?”
“Give it to me?” She seemed shocked by the words he used.
“That thing that you’re supposedly looking for. The thing that gives you permission never to know what you want.”
Rafe delivered his lines without turning around, and Melinda spoke hers while staring at the back of his head and then, when he persisted in refusing her gaze, at the back of his seat. Neither voice was raised, despite the bitterness of the words.
“Should we be having this discussion here?” she asked.
“Oh, where else? You won’t talk about it when we’re alone.” The piece of foil in his hands had been worried into strips but he continued mechanically to fold and unfold it.
“I think that’s enough,” she told him.
“Yes, perhaps it is,” he said, rising. “I’m going, then. You, stay.”
“I think perhaps I shall stay. And I shall stay with Annie tonight, later, now she’s back.”
“As you like,” he replied. He stood still for a moment, as if he were going to add something.
“Don’t,” she requested of him.
“Why would I?” He walked away.
The friends traded glances apprehensively.
“I’m sorry,” ventured Carl.
“Rubbish,” Melinda answered. “I’m sorry that any of you had to be a party to that. Would you accompany me, Annie?”
“Ehm, let me just find my wrap and my bag. Are those they, on the next chair, Thomas?”
“Oh, only to the loo, for now,” Melinda clarified.
“Just the bag, then,” Annie instructed Thom.
After the two women left, Thom shook his head and said, “I’ve never seen him in such a state.”
“It must be difficult,” said Henry, “if he wants to go and she doesn’t.”
No one was moved to comment further. They shifted in their seats and drank for a while without talking. A trio of strangers came near in search of a place to sit and then sheepishly withdrew, sensing from the silence that they had intruded.
It was disconcerting to sit quietly in a theater not serving its purpose.
“Have you seen the bridge?” Kaspar turned and asked Jacob, with his customary sly smile. He pointed to where the Charles Bridge would be, if it were visible through the walls of the theater.
“I saw it when we came in.”
“But there is a further garden.”
“There is?” Jacob asked.
“I show you?” Kaspar invited.
They left the others and walked out into a blue-green darkness. There were no lights, only a glow that fell from the mist-haloed iron lamps of the bridge, which loomed over them like an ocean liner over passengers in a rowboat. Water was lapping both sides of the low, tapering strip of land. Old, thin trees were planted in the cobblestones, and from their branches new-fledged leaves drooped like limp gloves and trembled.
There were lovers, here and there, under the trees. Kaspar and Jacob walked out into the garden, taking care not to stumble on the uneven stones. They had already drunk enough not to take too much notice of the chill.
“Tell me, how is your story?”
“I haven’t thought about it much,” Jacob admitted.
“There is so much happening for you.”
“Is there? Happening around me, maybe. Why do you ask?”
In the dark he sensed Kaspar’s shrug. “I am interested in your progress,” he said, again.
At the top of each of the bridge’s massive, diamond-shaped piers, a black saint had turned his back to them. “When I first heard about my friend I threw flowers off the bridge.”
“A pretty thing to do.”
“They weren’t such pretty flowers.”
“Well,” Kaspar said.
They found an empty bench and sat down.
“We stopped at Auschwitz during our trip to Poland,” Jacob told him.
“Did you?”
“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea of going there.”
“It is a horrible place.”
“I mean, I worked myself up into an argument about it. That it wasn’t even right to go there, somehow. That we as tourists didn’t have a moral right to. I was childish about it.”
“You felt the place,” Kaspar said.
“Or something.”
The bridge above them was quiet, but now and then a lover in the garden murmured or laughed. “Is it not beautiful here?”
“It is,” Jacob admitted. It felt imprudent to admit it. It might make it more painful to remember later—to remember that he had had to leave it. “How are you feeling? Should you be out here in this cold? You left your coat inside.”
“Do not worry so. You are like Melinda.”
“What do you think she’ll do?”
“She is turning at last to her own garden.”
“I don’t w
ant her to leave Rafe.”
“It is not on you or me,” Kaspar reasonably objected.
“I told her she should give Carl up, so she could find out what he meant to her. You know, your idea.”
“Mine?”
“You said you don’t believe in that kind of love. Where you leave someone because of an idea about yourself.”
“But once they do leave…”
“She could still patch it up with him.”
The question must not have interested Kaspar, because he let it pass without comment.
A figure approached them through the darkness and from ivory face, hands, and ankles crystallized as Melinda herself.
“La, do the rest know this is here?”
“Sit, sit,” said Kaspar, making room for her between them. “It is our secret.”
“Between two handsome men. I ought to have quarreled with my boyfriend sooner.”
Each man felt the warmth of her thin torso beside him.
“What are you going to do?” Jacob nervously asked.
“I shall stay with Annie tonight.”
“Will they make a fuss? I thought her overnight guests had to be registered in advance.”
“Oh, I shall tumble her into the soup again, shan’t I?”
“It’s all right,” Jacob assured her.
“Tell me that it will be.”
“Of course it will be.”
“Good,” she said cheerfully. She sat upright as if to improve her posture as well as her outlook and peered into the gray sky. “Do they have stars in Central Europe, do you think?”
“Not in Prague,” Jacob answered. “They have clouds.”
“They are pretty clouds, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes one does wish for a star or two. At night clouds can be rather…indistinct.”
“Do you know the constellations?”
“Oh god, are they all different here?” She took out her cigarettes but then didn’t smoke one. They were so close to the bridge that it, mist, and the river were all their view. “From here it looks less like a bridge than the wall of some great fortress,” she said.
“With a moat,” said Jacob.
“Yes. Defending what, exactly?” She shivered. “I think I shall go back inside. This is nearly Carl’s farewell party, isn’t it, and I shouldn’t like for a row to be his last memory of me.”
* * *
