Pavel speaks English now. He understands The Mighty Adventures of Asterisk and Lobe. It’s his favorite show: a cartoon for grownups. He hates the commercial breaks: endless advertisements for laxatives and toilet paper, for buy-buy-buy everything he doesn’t need. Jace does voiceovers for The Mighty Adventures of Asterisk and Lobe. He speaks the part of Swarm, the honeybee hive with delusions of grandeur. Swarm is the only gestalt-character Pavel has ever seen in a cartoon, for grownups or otherwise. Jace is good—very good—in bed, and he never does cartoon voices in the dark. Pavel understands English now. He speaks it well. He lives with Jace. In Chicago. * “What does it say?” Josephina asks, sliding an iPad across the tiny ocean of table space between them. Three Times a Man blasts from the speaker system: five-plus minutes of pseudo-punk angst and grinding guitars in the sustained key of garage-band lust. It is pure Americana: kitsch gone rusty and inflexible. Jace is a comfort at his side. Jace leans close and steals a peek at what Josephina has summoned to the screen of her iPad. He smells good: like something expensive and gender-neutral, something that comes in a frosted glass bottle in the shape of a nightmare from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, melted around the edges. Pavel flinches at what he sees—line after line of hand-written Cyrillic text. Something old, something scanned from paper gone yellow near the center and dry-rot-brown around the edges. Moths have eaten what they could. Mildew—or some such mold—has grown, like margins around the text. He scrolls down, down, down. Reading. “I don’t know Bulgarian,” Pavel says, sliding the iPad back to Josephina. Challenge sparks in her hazel eyes. “How do you know it’s Bulgarian if you can’t read it?” She doesn’t believe him, if her wounded, impish expression is any indication. “Can you speak German?” he asks. “Or French?” “No.” “Do you know these how languages look when you see them?” “Yes.” “Then there is the answer to your question.” Disappointment masks Josephina’s face. She snatches the iPad across the table and banishes the text from its face, shuts down, and slides it into her flat, black laptop bag. She touches the handle of her beer mug, hefts the glass and gulps a generous swallow. She is shaken, Pavel thinks. Disappointed. “Where did you find that?” Pavel asks. “My grandmother. My mother’s mother. She died. When we broke up her estate, when we threw everything out that we couldn’t sell…when we fought over who got what, I got this. I don’t know why I wanted it, why I even kept it, but there it is. It’s not like I was close to her. My grandmother. I knew her, but not like I know you guys. We never really spoke unless we had to. It’s like we didn’t like each other, but never admitted that. It’s like…we belonged to two different families. My brother got a load of her stuff. Books and records and things like that. I didn’t want anything, but I liked the way the writing looked when I saw this in her stuff. I kept it. Nobody else in my family seems to care what it is, where it came from, or why my grandmother had it.” Pavel nods. “There are other translators,” Jace suggests from Pavel’s side: a warm and slender comfort. He’s skinny, like a Kenyan, a Somali, an Ethiopian, but brown like something a little less African, despite origins on that continent. There’s something else in his bloodline, something distinct to US-America, Pavel thinks: a redness. He’s seen Africans, he’s dated a few. None were like Jace, not in the way that they looked, or in the ways they dressed. None were ever the voice for a gestalt cartoon character with delusions of grandeur. “I’m sure it would be easy enough to find one who speaks Bulgarian, a good one.” Josephina shakes her head. “No.” “No?” from Jace. “I trust you, Pavel,” Josephina says. “I like you both. I was just hoping you’d be able to read this and tell me what it says. It’s a part of my grandmother, even if I never really got to know her; I don’t want some stranger reading it.” Shaken, Pavel takes a sip of his beer. American stuff. Too fizzy. Too much alcohol and not enough flavor. He forces it down, sensitive—suddenly—to the curdled taste of beer from a country so young. * “Are you okay?” Jace asks, quietly. They’ve left the bar. They’ve taken a cab along the curve of Lake Shore Drive, and now—at the foot of their condo-complex, Pavel watches as the cab peels away and angles into southbound traffic, toward the loop, toward the glitter and gleam of a city in love with its own glamour. “I want to walk,” Pavel says. The night in the bar—the night with Josephina—has left him disturbed. “Will you walk with me?” “Where?” “The lake,” Pavel says. “In the sand. I want to take my shoes off: and my socks too, and I want to turn my back to the street and look east, where the sky is dark. Maybe I can see a star. I want to do this. With you.” Jace smiles. “Lead the way,” he says. The lake close enough to see, to smell—and on windy nights—to hear. * “Saint Nepomuk died,” Pavel says, suddenly and in sand-gritty darkness, “because he heard a confession he shouldn’t have. When asked to reveal it, by the king himself…he kept to his holy vow and revealed nothing. He was killed for his silence and thrown into Vltava. The king, I think, read his silence as a insolence and a kind of lie, so he killed him for it.” It is dark in the east. Faint lights gleam, marking the shore of Indiana, some small city there. Factories, Jace says. The lights, Pavel thinks, look like stars. Sand, cool and gritty, bites at Pavel’s soles and grates between his toes. Volleyball nets stand lonely and silent in the southern distance. Somewhere on Oak street, sirens wail at the onset of some emergency: a fire truck, its horn blares once. “I’ve seen his statue.” “Yes. He is many places in Praha. He marks the center of Karlovy Most.” “He’s still there? I touched him once, for luck, but when I lived in New York, I heard they moved him.” “He was only on loan, to a museum. He’s been put back.” Wistful nostalgia overcomes Pavel; it wraps him like a blanket, warm, on a cold night. “I didn’t know you when you were in my other city. I wish I did. I could have shown you things. My native house. The bar on Vodičkova Street, where I first kissed a boy. He didn’t like it, and now that I think of him, I don’t know why I did that.” Silence. Jace always seems appreciative of Pavel’s quiet remembrances, the questions he asks himself when thinking of what he’s done, what he’s seen, what he’s encountered: over there, in a land-locked country. There is—behind them—the sound of traffic: a slow and indolent drone. An airplane thunders overhead, navigation and formation lights flashing white, red, and green. The sound of flight fades to the west, but Pavel’s gaze remains level. His focus, he thinks, is lost somewhere across the water, somewhere on the northwestern shore of Indiana. “I never understood why Saint Nepomuk would let himself be killed,” Pavel says, “Or why he’d disobey the king and keep to his silence. He heard, as the story goes, a confession from the queen; she told him in confidence, overheard only by a dog, but are any potential scandals worth anyone’s life? When I was a child, I thought religion was stupid, and that it killed too many men, too many women, and made too many dogs the bearers of secrets they’d never be able to tell. But it’s not the same now.” “What’s changed?” Jace asks. “Dogs don’t care what they hear. They don’t bear secrets. Cats, maybe, but not dogs. The queen should have known to speak to a dog, and not a man.” Jace holds his silence. If he has questions about Pavel’s oblique manner of speaking, then he keeps those questions to himself. He simply touches Pavel’s hand, clasps his pinky finger. After a long and silent moment, Pavel inhales deeply. “I can speak my father’s Russian and my mother’s Czech,” he says. “I can speak your English well enough to understand cartoons. And so I was telling Josephina the truth when I told her I cannot read Bulgarian. But I am silent, like Saint Nepomuk, because I know of a confession that I must not repeat. “The words she has shown me are not in Bulgarian. They are a confession from a lover her grandfather could never marry. A man. It was not her grandmother’s letter…it was her grandfather’s…mixed up in her belongings and hidden in plain sight. No one ever thinks to look for secrets in their own belongings.” A chill descends and Pavel doesn’t know if the change in atmosphere is meteorological in nature, or simply a shift in the mood. Jace is silent: overwhelmed, perhaps, by what he has just heard. “I am not a villain,” Pavel says. “But I have lied to our friend.” Where words may fail Jace, touch excels. The hand-clasp intensifies and softens in the paradoxical way that only a lover might manage. He shifts on one foot, another, and turns Pavel to him. Fingers stroke the flanks of Pavel’s face and toy with strands of hair in need of a trim. Something flies overhead, a pigeon confused by the hepatic wash of city-light, and thrown from the natural rhythms of sleep and scavenging. “Your dead saint,” Jace says. “Was he a villain?” “He kept his vow. He disobeyed his king, but he kept his vow.” “And how are you any different?” “I am no saint, Jacek…I made no vows to keep confessions secret.” “There are no saints,” Jace says. He leans forward and touches a kiss to Pavel’s lips. “But there are secrets best left unshared, unspoken. Even now, what a dead man has said to another dead man should remain between them, no matter what a letter kept in an attic might otherwise say.” Silence. And then, half-whispered. “I don’t like to lie, Jacek.” “Neither do I.” * Pavel speaks English now. He understands The Mighty Adventures of Asterisk and Lobe. He watches it on Thursday nights, long after work, speaking as a translator for businessmen with a need for Russian or for Czech—speaking as a translator (or transcribing written words) before taking their money. He ignores the buy-buy-buy commercials for things he doesn’t need. Jace has been his lover for three years now. He is the voice of Swarm, the grandiose beehive and endless source of misadventure for Asterisk and for Lobe. Now, in lakefront darkness with sand between his toes, Pavel considers the strangeness of voices and the strangeness of languages, and his ability to lie. In English. Jace kisses his forehead. “It’s getting late,” he says, sounding nothing like the cartoon character whose voice is a distortion of his own. “Let’s go home,” he says. THE END *** As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed this little foray into...well...into linguistics, secrets, odd cartoon shows that don't exist, and a guy with a suspiciously familiar name--though he's not related to his real-life namesake in any way whatsoever, despite the fact that they're from the same city. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this little tale and thank you, again, for reading.