Keeping an Eye on Jakobson

When Simone and Juliet came home from school, Jakobson was sitting in the backyard smoking one of his big, smelly cigars. As usual, his hair was unkempt and he had ashes all over his suit jacket and in his beard. Things were always a little upside-down with Jakobson. He did not visit often, but when he did they always sat in the backyard because Jakobson could not tolerate an afternoon or evening without his cigars, and their father, who suffered from asthma, could not tolerate being in an enclosed space with Jakobson’s cigars. When Jakobson visited, they even ate in the backyard, something they did not do on any other occasion.

Their father never called Jakobson—which was pronounced with a soft j like a y—by his first name as he did his other friends. “Doesn’t Jakobson have a first name?” they asked their father.

“Of course he does,” he answered.

“Then why do you call him by just his last name?”

“Because our professor used to call us all by our last names.”

“But he doesn’t call you Buchovsky,” they pointed out.

“He used to.”

“Why did he stop?”

“I’m not sure. He just did,” their father said.

Their father had met Jakobson in graduate school; now, they were colleagues in the history department at Columbia, where their father taught courses in Russian Imperial History. Jakobson’s field was the Soviet period, and, despite the fact that Jakobson still had what their father called “a naïve soft spot for the ideals of communism,” they had remained friends all these years.

Juliet and Simone were surprised to find Jakobson sitting in the garden because their father had not mentioned anything about Jakobson coming, and he always told them when they were receiving visitors. There were always preparations the night before—shopping to be done, lamb to be marinated. When Jakobson came, they always had shashlik because their father considered it an outdoor food even though he did not barbecue it outdoors but broiled it under the broiler. Barbecues, he said, were superfluous. A broiler was so much less trouble.

“Are they teaching you about the war?” Jakobson asked Simone and Juliet before they could even say hello properly. He pulled hard, not pensively the way he usually did, on his long, scraggly beard.

“Which war?” Simone asked because there were so many of them.

“Which war?” Jakobson stood up and raised his fist in the air. The ashes flew from his clothes and Simone watched them fall back down to the ground. “Which war?” he repeated, beating the air with his fist.

“He means the Viet Nam War,” their father said calmly.

“On Fridays we have to bring in articles from the newspaper. The teacher puts them all on a bulletin board called ‘The State of the World,’” Simone said.

“And then what?” Jakobson sat down again and was suddenly limp, slumped back in his chair.

“Nothing. Sometimes she asks us to tell the class what our articles are about, but usually she just staples them to the bulletin board so we can read the articles at our own leisure if we finish our work or get to school early.”

“All the girls in my class have POW bracelets,” Simone added. “I don’t have one because my father says it’s a money-making scheme.” Just last week had been the week of the POW bracelet. Simone had bought one with her own money and proudly shown it to her father the minute he came home. Her POW, Private Kenneth F. Snelling, was from Wisconsin. He was a big fan of the Twins baseball team, played the trumpet, and was very handy. “I had to fill out a special registration form so when he is released he’ll know that I have been wearing his bracelet and he’ll write me a letter,” Simone had announced proudly to her father.

“Do you have any idea what the prisoner-of-war camps are like?” her father had asked.

Perhaps because their father did not believe in television, Simone imagined the POW camps...