“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 fiction.
“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.
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