Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “I don’t believe in monogamy,” she announced. “I don’t think it is possible. Twenty-eight years, and you really expect to have only the one person forever?”

  Monogamy; he was impressed again at how good her English was. He couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know what she was saying, dismissing his heartache. Except it wasn’t even heartache. It was more diffuse, this life-sick uncertainty. He asked Thereza if there was a Czech word for the feeling, or a German one. Possibly one existed in Russian, but neither of them would know it. Instead of offering a word, she asked him to describe the feeling.

  He thought of the bubbling cross, the sorry suicide. It was an obscene comparison, and he made it anyway: “Like being set on fire.”

  “And this is what you do when you are on fire? Instead of finding a bucket of water, you run around the world in your little orange jog shorts. You stay all over with fire.”

  “Did I do something to make you angry?”

  Thereza kicked her heels against the concrete like a child. “No. But you are a type of person, you understand—the man in middle life, unhappy with his wife, unhappy in his country, so he comes to Czech and thinks everything will be better.”

  I guess you’re the kind of guy who gets to think that, he heard Maria saying. “Look, I’m not a type of person, I’m a person.”

  “You are both. Me too. I’m the pretty girl who makes things better.” She blinked at him like a cartoon ingenue.

  He did not feel, in this moment, like she was making anything better, but he understood that he had told her about the affair because he had expected her to.

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” she said. “Only that I know this story already, and it is a boring story.”

  “Then you can tell me how it ends,” George said, but Thereza declined.

  Five weeks after George arrived in Prague his ATM card stopped working. The machine whirred and beeped and ate it. He went to an internet café to confirm the balance of his checking account, the limit on his Visa. The pages refused to load, the bank claiming he had a defunct user ID. He gave up and checked his e-mail, found a message from his wife. She had closed the joint checking account, reopened one in her name only; she had emptied the savings account into a twelve-month CD under her name. Come home and we’ll talk, she had written. I’m sorry for a lot of things. But I’m not financing your midlife crisis.

  Riding the tram back to his apartment, George was terrified of pickpockets. He pressed his wallet against his thigh, forgetting that almost everything inside it was now useless. At the apartment, he returned a call from the Austrian. “I’m not sure I need a whole week. Would that be possible, to just buy a couple of days?”

  “You’ve been a good tenant. Two days, we will say.”

  George asked if he could pay by credit card this time, gave him the number of the one card he’d always held in his name only, asked if the Austrian might be able to process a larger amount, let George have the difference: “So many of the places around here only take cash.”

  The answer was a polite no: transaction fees, exchange rates. “Congratulations, though,” the Austrian said with more than a hint of sarcasm, and George froze.

  “On what?” The absolute mess he’d somehow made of his entire life? Had the Austrian guessed why George needed the money? How many tourists had flailed in and flamed out of this apartment? All the birch-colored, clean-lined furniture suddenly looked sinister.

  “Your new president,” his landlord elaborated, though George had watched so little news he didn’t know who had been declared the victor. “You finally have a winner.”

  “I guess that’s good?”

  “I wouldn’t have said so myself. But of course, there is value in knowing the outcome.”

  The only hobby Thereza had ever talked about was beach volleyball, of all things; she met people once a week at BeachKlubPraha, a few sandy courts and a plywood cabana wedged into the yard of a junior high school near Pankrác Prison. George waited for her evening practice to end; he’d counted the money left in his wallet and didn’t eat that day. It took him half an hour of walking from the Pankrác Metro station to find the BeachKlub, and his stomach growled audibly as he watched Thereza play. He’d been hungry for a single day and it was all he could think about. He would have made a terrible dissident, he knew.

  It was much too cold to be standing still outside but the players were jumping and diving and Thereza was sweating in leggings and a T-shirt. He handed her the water bottle beside her gym bag as she came off the court, and she began to shiver almost immediately, gooseflesh flaring across her arms and legs.

  She seemed both surprised and unsurprised to see him there. “What are you doing this weekend?” she asked him. George didn’t respond, keeping his face carefully blank in the hope that Thereza might suggest an escape plan. “If you are free, I thought we might go to Dresden, maybe Berlin. Lots of sightseeing for you. Maybe some shopping?”

  “Jenny. Thereza. I’m not a rich man,” George said.

  “I know, you are not made of money. Or you don’t grow on trees, or something.”

  “It’s not a joke. It’s a—confession,” he said, searching for the right word and feeling a bit surprised that he’d found it: he had a secret to confess. “I’m broke.”

  “Really?”

  Shame kept him silent, but the answer was clear enough.

  “Then I suppose we shouldn’t go to Germany.”

  “I really can’t afford it. I’m sorry.”

  “Will you go home now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need cheap places, Bratislava is very fine. Romania, Ukraine, the life there is very hard, so the prices very low. Go to the villages. My parents, they have a weekend house in Mokri. The restaurant there serves soup for eight crowns.”

  “I’m really broke, Thereza. I don’t have the money to go anywhere else.”

  Thereza stared at him. “You need money.”

  “I’ll pay it back.”

  “You have no job.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “Do prdele. You are asking me for money.”

  “If there were anyone else—”

  “How about your wife? She can wire you money. Buy you a plane ticket online. You are not in Siberia.”

  “A plane ticket?”

  “You have some other plan?”

  It was only then that George realized how badly he wanted Thereza to say, Stay in Prague. Stay with me. Stay in my apartment that you have never seen, and call me by my name, which I have never let you use. He understood at the same time how impossible it was for her to say it. It wasn’t even that he thought they could live well together. He couldn’t picture himself looking for a job here, couldn’t picture what he would be qualified for. Couldn’t picture making pork and dumplings for Sunday dinners at home. He just wanted to hear her say, Stay, and to feel as if there were still a choice to be made.

  “The very earliest she could get me money would be tomorrow.”

  “So?”

  “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  “This is not my problem. You are not my problem.”

  “Thereza—”

  “I told you to call me Jenny.”

  The other players were pulling on coats and sweatpants, carefully looking away but standing close enough to hear. George wondered how much English they understood. Thereza grabbed her bag and pulled him around a corner of the school until they were standing by themselves under a rusted basketball hoop. She pulled her wallet from her gym bag and took out the cash. She counted it, handed it all to him. Three hundred crowns. Twelve dollars.

  “You can see,” she said. “All the cash I have this moment. You will need to call your wife soon. You will be so hungry, the plane ride will be happier. You will be going back to America, but they will feed you. You will see her in Texas and you will say, Wife! My stomach is full now of froz
en chicken, thank you! Cruel Czech girl, she gives only sandwich and bus fare to airport.”

  That much was true, George thought. That as he got on BA Flight 807 two days from now with a ticket his wife had paid for, the same flight he refused to board five weeks earlier, he would be thankful. He would soar toward London and then Houston and when they brought him a plastic-wrapped sandwich, a thin foil tray, a tiny cup of soda, he would be agonizingly grateful.

  The Untranslatables

  He was a collector. He put the words in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, and on index cards, like recipes. He typed them up in computer files without any attempt at alphabetization, hyggelig following ilunga following Scheissenbedauern, the last of which meant “being disappointed when something turns out better than expected,” a feeling he could not remember ever experiencing.

  He believed that one day he would put all the untranslatables in a scrapbook dictionary. It would be large and heavy with startlingly sharp corners, and he would place it on a shelf and wait for the woman who would notice it. Leaving her in his living room, he would go to the kitchen to make coffee or pour wine. Lingering, he’d listen for the sound of the book being pulled off the shelf, the slight grunt as she realized how heavy it was, then returned to the couch with it. He would wait for the woman who loved his untranslatables, who would say, The word gökotta means “to picnic at dawn on Ascension Day and listen for the cuckoo’s song.” This, he promised himself, was the woman he would marry—the only woman he could marry—but his book was not yet done. There was no purpose even in inviting a woman to his home before then, because he would not be able to learn the one thing about her he needed most to know.

  Many of the untranslatables were German, but not all. Luoma, Finnish, verb: to give up something, but peacefully and wholeheartedly, as after a long illness or a deep suffering, and to step, however wistfully, into the next part of your life. Mamihlapinatapei, from Yaghan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego: a wordless glance between two people, lingering and meaningful. They can be lovers or strangers but they are both hoping very much for something to happen. Neither risks initiating.

  There was a temp at the insurance agency where he worked with whom he once shared such a glance. She had pale orange hair and eyes so green he thought she might be wearing colored contacts. He was delivering papers to her to be alphabetized and filed. She took the papers and their eyes met and mamihlapinatapei passed between them and then her phone rang. She apologized and answered. He never saw her again. He was both grieved and pleased that he had experienced the true meaning of this Yaghan word, and he felt closer to those faraway people who had invented it. He understood them, he thought, and they him, even if he didn’t understand the temp.

  He treasured even the words he could not pronounce, could write only by tracing: Ιστορίες με αρκούδες, “stories with bears,” meaning anecdotes so improbable that the listener doubts their veracity even as he hopes ardently for them to be true. Over the years his house had filled with thousands of words. They burst out of desk drawers and underwear drawers and cutlery drawers. English, although his native tongue, looked poorer and more enfeebled by the day. He was desperate to tell someone about all these words. He wondered what the temp might have said, if she would have believed him or if she would have dismissed him for telling stories with bears. He wondered if her eyes had really been so green and what the word for that shade might be.

  He surrendered himself to toska, about which Nabokov had once bragged: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for.”

  And in the throes of toska the collector acquired Kummerspeck, “grief bacon,” which was extra weight gained through emotional overeating. And when he wanted so much to cafuné, to gently run his fingers through someone’s hair in Brazilian Portuguese, that he could barely breathe, he calmed himself by reciting more playful words like tingo, which on Easter Island meant to slowly remove all the objects from a neighbor’s house by borrowing and not returning them.

  One day, however, even his untranslatables could not console him, and he began to write descriptions with no words. He knew he could just make up a string of syllables, but he didn’t feel like he would be good at it. He would need an ear for it, and that went on an index card as well: A feel for the sounds of spoken language, an instinct for what noises will best suit a particular meaning. He chanted nonsense syllables to himself in the shower, knowing that they might be incantations in some language he had never heard or that had long since died or that had yet to be created.

  He realized that he might be a Korinthenkacker, a “raisin pooper,” someone so taken with trivial details that he spent all day crapping raisins, someone like his office manager, who left trails of obsessive Post-it notes across everyone’s desk. But his untranslatables didn’t feel like raisins or like Post-its. They felt immense, so immense they couldn’t be contained in a house, much less a scrapbook, and the man began to build a shed in his backyard. The untranslatables filled the outbuilding before the roof was finished, and in a rainstorm the sheaves of paper grew soft and damp and then mildewed, and he could find no word for what he felt when he looked at them, at the work of so many years rotting in his hands.

  But such a word must exist or else the collector was feeling some emotion that no human, in all the ages of the earth, had ever felt, and that was such a lonely thought that he thrust it immediately from him. He redoubled his research, searching for this word, and then began to worry that perhaps it was already in him, hidden in plain sight, and mistakenly assigned to a utilitarian object. Toast, perhaps, was meant to mean something grander than warm, crispy bread. Milk, or eat, or check the mail, or check, or mail. He sat at his office desk and whispered aloud the names of all his office supplies, waiting for one to bloom. These recitations he tried to make sound like the patter of a radio, to avoid drawing his coworkers’ concern. But eventually he stopped talking altogether; ordinary words had become potentially deceptive, and he couldn’t even be sure what he meant, much less what others meant.

  Poor communication skills, the office manager wrote in his dismissal letter.

  He asked if she could recommend a temp agency that might sign him. Where had the insurance company hired its temps from?

  That was confidential, she said. No, she couldn’t refer him. She couldn’t even give him the name.

  Aceldama, a place where much blood has been shed. Orenda, a single human’s will set against the encroaching forces of destiny. That was a Huron word, which, given the near decimation of the tribe, took on extra resonance. He wondered about a new category of untranslatables: Words that in their historical context became ironic or inefficacious. Words that did not even mean themselves once history was done with them.

  His house softened and rotted like paper while grass grew tall and fierce, and the city came and posted new words on his doors and windows until he left. He felt Torschlusspanik, which was the gate-closing panic caused by one’s life narrowing to a tunnel. And finally he felt as if he were living with yoko meshi, “boiled rice eaten sideways,” the stress of trying to communicate in a foreign language. His whole life, he had been eating and eating, all of it sideways.

  That was the last of his definitions without words: the loneliness, the tension of the tongue, the torque of a jaw that has held as many words as it can, and a heart that is still empty. He did not believe he could be the only person who had wanted for this word. He knew it must be out there somewhere. And so he kept a chewed pencil nub beside a single sheet of paper, blank and expectant. He waited along with the paper, desperate to hear the word in someone’s mouth, to recognize it. To recognize her, looking up at him with green eyes and a mouth full of names. Luoma, he sometimes tried to tell himself. Luoma. But he could not accomplish it. Instead, he swallowed the word
and crouched, listening, until his whole body was an ear.

  Paradise Lodge

  The plane from Cuzco arrives only a little late; the minibus gets only a little stuck on the muddy road; the long motorized canoe scrapes threateningly at the river bottom but does not run aground. This group of tourists is not as fat as the last one, Victor notices cheerily. They are easily charmed too—by the sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves that Victor serves from a cooler for lunch; by the cartoon jaguar that the park security checkpoint stamps in their passports. Victor does not tell them that this is the only jaguar they will see all week. He does not tell them that the animal is so endangered in the Tambopata that they’re as likely to see a chullachaqui or a unicorn.

  From the dock, the guests clamber up the muddy slope to the main building, a giant A-frame of dark logs, thatched roof. A manager assigns room numbers and guides. A single mother with two kids and a bickering young couple are entrusted to Victor’s care. It’s a bad draw, and some of the other guides nod sympathetically. But no one offers to trade. Victor asks the children where they’re from, making conversation while the luggage is brought up from the boat. Bogotá? Yes, Colombia, despite their North American accents and corn-silk hair, heads and arms and legs catching the sunlight, flashing like traffic reflectors in the clearing beside the lodge. They do not ask him where he is from, so he does not have to lie, pretend he’s jungle-born.