by Caleb Crain
The last dish rinsed, Henry fetched a boom box from his bedroom, propped it on a pedestal of paperbacks in the living room, and plugged it in. “Now the party starts,” said Henry.
“Without the guest of honor?”
“Bugger him.” From a short row of cassettes Henry chose one with a handwritten label and shut it into the machine. The rotors began to turn. It was something punk, which even Jacob recognized though he couldn’t have named it. Henry turned the volume up so high that they all stepped away.
“Henry,” remonstrated Annie.
It was, as Henry said, the start of the party. The light inside the rooms had become more interesting than the light outside, Jacob saw, when at the next buzz he threw the keys down to Thom, who had appeared not with Jana but with Hans. Outside there were now only the evenly spaced orange glows of the street lamps, partly obscured at the height of Henry’s window by the dark leaves of the street’s lindens, which wavered unmeaningly, like fans loosely held in the hands of people who have become abstracted by music. Thom and Hans entered the building, but Jacob continued to lean out into the evening. Behind him the noise of the boom box was brittle. Before him the evening was rich and gentle, as it had been when he had sat with Kaspar under the shadow of the Charles Bridge. As he enjoyed its contrast with the bright, loud room that his feet, at least, were in, he heard approaching footsteps on pavement and the songlike sound of people speaking in English cadences. Carl and Melinda were walking arm in arm. They had brought Kaspar, who was limping slightly.
“Stand and unfold yourself,” Jacob hailed them.
Startled, they looked up. “Nay, answer me,” replied Melinda. Her face shone in the darkness.
“Thom has the keys and he hasn’t got upstairs yet,” Jacob explained.
They nodded. “Wild party?” asked Carl, as they waited.
“Pretty wild,” Jacob answered. “.”
“Psych.”
The distance between them was too great to have a proper conversation across it, and they fell silent. Melinda and Carl murmured to each other; Kaspar looked away down the street, in the direction that they hadn’t come from. What was Jacob going to search for now, Jacob wondered of himself as he watched them. Now that this was ending. No, that wasn’t the question. He knew what he was searching for, as well as he ever had. It was a feeling about the world: an answering quality. What he had lost track of was a sense of where to search for it—where he might be likely to hear it, if it could still be heard anywhere.
Behind him he recognized Thom’s brogue and turned to retrieve the keys. Tossed into the darkness, they were caught by Carl overhand. “Hey,” Carl said, as if inviting compliments on his catch, before unlocking the door. Jacob lingered for a few moments more, still leaning out into the empty night.
The partygoers crowded into the narrow vestibule, and Jacob saw Carl and Melinda at first only over the heads and in the interstices between his friends. The vestibule was lit by a bare light bulb, which hit the couple bluntly and made their brows shadow their eyes and their chins shadow their necks, but the revealed color of their complexions was so full of life that it had the effect of subtilizing and softening the light. Walking through the spring night had left them fresh and careless; they had brought the air of the night indoors with them. Even Kaspar, quietly fastening the bolt behind them, seemed pink and happy as he blinked against the glare.
They demanded drinks, perhaps as a pretext for shaking themselves a little free of the demanding crowd, and suddenly everyone in the room felt the need of drinks, and the press of people shifted to the kitchen. Then Henry was obliged to give Melinda a tour of the other two rooms, accompanied again by more or less everyone, though most had already seen them.
“But where are your shirts, Jacob?” Melinda wheeled on him in the living room to ask. “Henry told me the other day that it was like a meadow in bloom here, they were so brightly colored and tossed about with such abandon.”
“That was only so they could dry,” Jacob said.
“And now you’ve put them away. Shame. Is this where you sleep?” she asked, taking a seat on the sofa. She idly smoothed the Indian print that they had found under Henry’s bed and spread over the sofa a few hours before. “Must we have that light, do you think?”
Kaspar, who was nearest, flipped a square plastic switch in the wall, and the bulb winked out, leaving them no more than the yellow that spilled over the lintel from the kitchen and the orange that came brokenly through the windows from the streetlamps outside.
The obscurity seemed to discontent Hans, who asked, “And what is the occasion for this party?” in a voice a little too loud and slightly petulant, as if he had been brought into this ambiguous room against his better judgment.
“Departure,” Melinda told him.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Carl explained.
“To return to the land of the Great Satan,” Hans inferred.
“Gently now, gently,” Thom advised.
“I’m going to the land of the Great Cannoli, actually,” Carl replied.
“I’m taking him to Rome,” Melinda disclosed.
“You are?” Thom queried.
“We’re running off,” she said.
“Is cannoli too North End?” said Carl. “Maybe they don’t even actually have cannolis in Rome.”
“They have cannoli in Rome,” Henry confirmed from the doorway.
There was a silence as their other friends took in the news.
“Did you know of this, Henry?” Thom asked.
Henry shook his head.
“Did you, Annie?”
“Melinda told me this morning, as it happens.”
Now Thom shook his head. “You’ll be sorely missed. I know Jana will be sorry she had no chance to raise a glass to you, so I’ll take care to raise twice as many meself.”
“That is kind of you,” Melinda said.
“Goodness,” Thom added, mostly to himself, and again shook his head.
“Is Rafe aware of your plans?” Henry asked.
“Wasn’t too keen on them,” Melinda replied.
“Mmm.”
A song ended, and in the silence that followed, a little longer than it needed to be in accordance with the casual way the tape had been mixed, the foreknowledge of what they would be to one another even after they had parted seemed to well up and become stronger in each one, perhaps because the parting was imminent, perhaps because they had been reminded of Rafe’s unhappiness, perhaps because of an awareness that Carl and Melinda would carry off with them a piece of what they had all shared.
Pale Hans shifted restlessly.
“How much longer will you stay, Hans?” Melinda asked.
“I cannot bear to stay here for much longer.”
“Hans is, like you, one of the last Communists in Czechoslovakia,” Melinda told Kaspar, who was sitting beside her on the sofa. “As yet unrecalled by your national committees.”
“Oh yes,” Kaspar said. He had heard of Hans. Afraid perhaps that Melinda gave too much credit to himself and too little to Hans, Kaspar added, “I am only a new, how do you say, a new disciple.”
“A convert,” Jacob suggested, prompted by his habits as a teacher.
“Yes, that is the word, a convert.”
“It surprised you perhaps, that your precious Havel could do such things,” Hans said.
On Kaspar’s face appeared in reply the mild and quizzical look that had so often irritated Jacob and now had a similar effect on Hans.
“Dollar for dollar,” Hans continued, “nothing that Honecker ever did amounted to so great a crime.”
From the reference to the East German leader, it was evident that Hans, on his side, had also heard of Kaspar.
“Is it in dollars,” Kaspar replied, “that one should measure?”
“What other way, in this world?” Hans asked. One could hear from the way his words were formed that his mouth was twisted in disgust, though it was too dark to see such a detail. “These
‘liberals’ will give away industries made by the people, owned by the people—give them away! To sell them would be foolish enough.”
“Aren’t they giving them to the people?” Jacob asked.
“You believe that. Have you talked to the people?”
“People seem a little confused, but I haven’t talked to very many about it,” Jacob admitted.
“When the people are confused it is no accident,” Hans said. “Someone wants them to be. Someone arranges it!”
He was shouting. Thom, who was standing beside the boom box, bent his knees so as to slide down the wall he was leaning against, and with a comic pretense of imagining himself unobserved, turned up the volume to match that of Hans’s voice. Once a few people had chuckled, he scooted down the wall a second time to turn the volume down again.
“You oughtn’t to attack Kaspar,” Annie said. “He’s likely the only one here who agrees with you.”
“My chemists say they don’t know what they’ll do with their coupons,” Jacob volunteered. “These chemists I teach. And they all have PhDs.” If he was willing to concede a few points, maybe it would be harder for Hans to turn the conversation into a fight. “But the reforms have to be done quickly, after all.”
“Quickly, yes,” Hans replied, “before the people have a chance to give it thought. Crisis—the midwife of capitalism. The ‘advisers’ arrive and say, My god, they have no predatory class here. It is an emergency! We must create one immediately. Let us arrange to give everything to a few crooks. Then this country, too, will have a mess of parasites to rule it, to suck the value of the people’s labor.”
It was as if Hans were releasing a wasp into the room in the hope that someone would volunteer to be stung. For a few moments none of the partygoers moved or spoke, lest the wasp should land on one of them. Hans shook his head, as if giving up on them, and they sensed that the danger was passing—that the wasp was flying away and out the open window, as it were.
How tiresome that rigmarole is, thought Jacob. He drank a few times from his beer, and it occurred to him that he hated being compelled to think of ideas on a night when he wanted to think of his friends, especially when the ideas seemed to have in them nothing of the texture of what he had experienced with his friends. Jacob didn’t know anything about economics; in America, a person with his ambitions, or lack of them, almost never did. In the British newsweekly he liked to read—once again the only English-language magazine available on Prague newsstands, now that the American competitor that had come with the war had gone with the peace—Jacob found the editors’ confidence in their economic convictions appealing, though he hardly understood the grounds for them. “You’ve been reading it altogether too much,” Daniel had once teased him, back in Boston; “you’re starting to believe that the problems of the world all have solutions.” Understanding the world’s problems had been Daniel’s forte; it wasn’t Jacob’s. For all Jacob really knew, Hans was right. After all, there was something economic about the freedom that he had experienced here, and the matter had to lie deeper than the currency exchange rate, so favorable to Western visitors, because people like Annie and him felt it even though they lived for the most part on their salaries in crowns. Jacob had never felt anything like it before. Maybe it was an aftereffect of Communism, but he preferred to think of it as an aspect of transition—of conditions changing so quickly and at so many levels that no one had yet figured out how to use them to separate people from the easy things that made them happy. What it felt like, practically speaking, was that one looked forward in the morning to the events of the day for themselves—to riding the rickety, musical tram, or to drinking a beer with friends. One did not think about getting through the day, or about winning anything with the use of it—there was no idea of losing the day as if in trade for something else. It was lost innocently, for nothing. But this quality of loss would have to be lost, in turn.
The necessity for the second loss was what Hans didn’t understand. Jacob wondered if Carl and Melinda understood it.
“Where will you go, if you don’t stay?” Melinda asked Hans.
“There is nowhere,” he said bitterly. “To Denmark,” he finished, with humorless irony. He meant that he would never return to Denmark. As a pretext for flirtation, he began to complain to a couple of the Czech women from the language school of the countries that he might have to travel to in order to carry on the struggle. The women seemed to regard his flirtation as so conscious that his politics could be overlooked; as a Westerner, moreover, he represented the end of Communism to them whether he meant to or not; and so by lust or at least a wish for company, he, too, became reconciled for the time being to the half-light of the room.
Jacob took a corner of the sofa, beside Kaspar and Melinda, and let himself sink into it. He wished that Kaspar had defended himself, because he had never quite understood how Kaspar justified his change of politics. It reminded Jacob of the way children fed animals—of the way he and his sister, in the small Massachusetts town where they had grown up, had picked tufts of grass on the near side of a wood-post fence and offered them to three llamas that a townsman had kept in a field as pets. He and Alice had always tried to feed the grass to the shyest llama, though they never got to know the llamas well enough to know whether the same one was always shy or the llamas took turns—whether the shyness was a matter of personality or of happening to be less hungry on a particular day. Sometimes a bold llama made as if to nip the shy one on the jowl, in brotherly menace, so the children feinted with their gifts, moving as if to thrust the grass over one part of the fence and at the last minute swapping the stalks to the opposite hand and thrusting them over another part, creating a game where the children’s pale arms and the llamas’ white necks waved and circled and nearly intertwined as if in impersonation of some monster out of Greek mythology. Whenever the game grew too challenging, the llamas drifted away, usually the shy llama first, and the children had to call them back. The animals were wary and greedy, like cats. Invariably the bolder llamas snatched most of the grass out of the children’s hands despite their efforts. The children’s choice wasn’t any more rational than a choice to reward the most aggressive llama would have been—it would have made as much sense to feed the grass to the animal that seemed to want it most—but they always played the game so as to reward the llama that held back. Kaspar, Jacob thought, chose his politics by a similar instinct.
Jacob was drunk enough that it wasn’t until he was halfway through sharing his analogy that it occurred to him that it could be considered disparaging to Kaspar—that Jacob might seem to be calling Kaspar sentimental or childish or even unprincipled—but he was too far along to stop and he stammered on to the end of his idea.
“The llama problem,” Carl named it. He and the others had leaned in, to hear Jacob’s explication to Kaspar.
“But can capitalism and communism be llamas?” Melinda objected. “Aren’t they rather ways of feeding llamas?”
“So it’s meta,” Carl said. “It’s postmodern.”
“Oh dear,” Melinda worried.
“I would say…,” Kaspar began. He paused to drum the fingers of one hand against his lips. He hadn’t taken offense; Jacob’s story seemed if anything to have pleased him. “I would say, why shouldn’t how a child feels be the way to decide?”
“The llama Communism himself has a touch of mystery on his hands at the moment, it would seem,” Thom alerted them. Hans, they saw, was kissing one of the women he had been talking to.
“That’s a llama of another color.”
“Quite a few llamas of that color of late,” said Thom. “How is it you have been spared the darts of Cupid, Jacob, I have sometimes wondered?”
“I had a boyfriend for a little while,” Jacob answered.
“I’m sorry? Did anyone else hear him say he had a boyfriend?” He thought Jacob was joking.
The friends waited.
“Don’t be such an eejit,” Annie said.
“Is tha
t what he said?” Thom asked again, beginning to be confused. He looked to Jacob. “Are you gay then?” The word sounded unfamiliar in Thom’s brogue, and Thom seemed unaccustomed to it.
Jacob nodded.
“Goodness.” Thom took two swigs from his bottle. “And you all know. How long have you known, then?” No one answered him. “Nobody tells me fuck all, do they. And me yammering on about poofters and thespians. How could you let me?” He took another swig. “I’ve never been so ashamed in me life.”
“As well you should be,” Annie said.
“That makes me feel much better.”
“I didn’t care about those words,” said Jacob. “They’re funny words.”
“You might have dropped us a hint.”
“Maybe he did drop one and you were too much of an eejit to pick it up, unlike the rest of us.”
“You let me say such things,” Thom said. “I have no choice now but to drown my sorrows.”
“I can’t stand in your way.”
“I wouldn’t, sir, after the way you have behaved yourself. Anyone else need another?”
“You could perhaps have told him sooner,” Annie said, after Thom had gone to fetch the next round.
“I should have,” Jacob agreed happily. Now there were no more secrets, or anyway no more that Jacob could tell.
* * *
By midnight they were dancing in Henry’s living room, jostling one another in the course of their movements as if by accident. The boom box had been turned up several times and was blaring as loud as it could, with a monotonous, rhythmic force. They had by this time heard the tape through twice, complained that they were bored of it, tried another, and in the end returned to it for lack of a satisfactory alternative—forced to recognize that it was their music for the night.
“I have quite nice shoulders,” Annie asserted, over the din, while dancing next to Jacob.
“You do,” Jacob agreed.
“Henry complimented me on them.”
“Did he,” Jacob acknowledged.
There was a sharpness and a greediness in her boast that Jacob took for a sign of health. They were, as a group, going to act tonight with less caution and less solicitude toward one another than usual, he thought. They were going to take risks. They were losing one another anyway, and they were healthy. They could dance with this violence all night if they wanted to, on the fuel of youth, Prazdroj, and . The Czech women wanted to prove that their zest matched any Westerner’s; Thom, that for his friends he could trample down any awkwardness. Hans was sedulously giving the Czech women’s energy a lascivious turn, Annie glowed with Henry’s new interest in her, and Henry himself, bent at the waist, his curls sweaty, his wide eyes vacant as he concentrated on his dancing, had the vigor and wildness of a faun. Only Carl and Melinda danced in the old, tender style.
