Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  It occurred to Jacob that a pause might be mistaken for complicity. —No, never, he said.

  —Well, then, Luboš said, as if winding up a conversation. He seemed to see further doubts in Jacob’s eyes and added, —I did not really think it of you specially. I was kidding.

  —You kid a lot.

  —An awful lot, you’re right. Don’t become angry.

  —No, no, Jacob assured him. Luboš seemed afraid that he might have hurt Jacob. Jacob realized he hadn’t washed his hands, and they felt hot and prickly; his palms were white, with red mottling. —I’m going to…, he began, and he rubbed his hands in pantomime.

  In the restroom he paid fifty hellers to the attendant, even though he wasn’t going to use a urinal; it was simpler than trying to explain. Recently someone had taught him an obscene word for the women who worked in restrooms, who looked grandmotherly but were usually quite stern. A word for them and a word for waiters—perhaps there was an obscenity for everyone who was placed by work in the way of the public. He washed his face, too, and decided not to let the conversation return to Luboš’s question.

  The beauty of the dining hall struck him, when he reentered it, like a kind of heat that he could feel on the skin of his face.

  * * *

  Because he knew it by heart, he decided to discuss one of Emily Dickinson’s poems in his first meeting with the school’s most advanced class, which he had recently been asked to teach as a substitute, every other Thursday. He wasn’t sure how advanced the students would be. was one of them—she had enjoyed his momentary disorientation when she had told him, upon crossing his path in the stairwell at home, that she looked forward to seeing him Thursday afternoon—but that gave him little indication, because it was hard to say how much English she knew. He always tried to speak Czech to her, for the sake of practice, and she, after one or two ironic sallies into English, usually gave her ground and retreated into Czech, as if it were somehow immodest for her to continue in Jacob’s language when he wasn’t speaking it.

  He found her sitting in the back row, sharing her textbooks with a bald man who had forgotten his. Neither she nor Jacob betrayed to the other students that he lived in her parents’ house; she gave her name with the others, neutrally, when he asked the students to introduce themselves.

  After reviewing an exercise set by the regular teacher, he wrote the poem on the blackboard, his hands shaking, as they always did before strangers. He then asked them to say what they thought the pronouns referred to, taking them one by one.

  That it will never come again

  Is what makes life so sweet.

  Believing what we don’t believe

  Does not exhilarate.

  That if it be, it be at best

  An ablative estate—

  This instigates an appetite

  Precisely opposite.

  When he called on , she said, “Já?”—me?—and pointed at herself, wide-eyed. But she was able to say when “it” was life, and when afterlife, and what it is we don’t believe. Slowly the class unriddled the poem, which Jacob liked because the ambivalence in it was so fine, and the ambiguities so few. It was odd, too, in being composed almost purely of ideas; it had so little in it of the sweet world whose loss concerned it, except perhaps in its sound, which was like a nursery rhyme’s.

  After class, he found Annie at the top of the stairs, trying to shift her cassette player and manila folders into her knapsack before they slipped from her hands.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Oh, that’s grand, thanks. In these shoes I need a free hand for the banister.” A tall, south-facing window—a modern rectangle of Gothic narrowness—lit the stairwell with thin cold light, which burned into a filament a straw-colored plait that fell over her eyes. “Do you keep to the curricular schedule, Jacob? I don’t see how I’m going to catch up. Today I had them pronounce words that end in B and G and so on, because not one of them could say ‘dog.’ They say ‘doc,’ have you noticed?”

  Thom was waiting for them in the lounge. “Annie, my love, you don’t happen to have any of those apricot pastries left on your hands, by any chance?”

  “Did you try the little shop across the way?”

  “I did, but the schoolgirls have eaten them all up.”

  “You have to go quite early,” Annie told him. “What will you offer in exchange, then? I’ve only four left.”

  “Only four! I can offer a Sparta.”

  “Mmm. They’re rather rough on the back of the throat, I find. I always feel afterward as if I’m coming down with something.”

  Jacob donated a Marlboro light instead, which liberated two pastries, one for him and one for Thom.

  “Is it true what Michael says, that he’s going back to Edinburgh because you’ve found a Czech girlfriend and now he has to drink alone?”

  “Michael’s going back to sign on, is what he must have meant to say, before Thatcher and her lot do away with the dole altogether and he misses his chance.”

  “I had no idea you were such a conservative,” Annie said.

  “I think a working man has a right to know his tax monies are not ill-spent.”

  “What’s her name, then?”

  “Jana.” He said it shyly.

  “A proper Czech name. She sounds quite nice.”

  “She is that, yes.”

  “She would have to be, to put up with such a lot as you. Is she impressionable?”

  “Quite her own person, rather.”

  “Will we be meeting her?”

  “In time. She doesn’t speak much English yet.”

  “And I don’t suppose you’re speaking Czech to her. How do you communicate?”

  “It’s always possible,” Jacob put in.

  “It is, yes,” Thom reflected.

  Annie carefully wrapped the last pastry in the white sack she had bought them in. “Did either of you men of the world know that there’s now a paper shortage? Your man in the shop, there, was reluctant to give me this sack. I had to plead with him for it. That’s why I bought so many. It was šest or nothing.”

  “What will you do,” Jacob asked, “if she falls in love with you?”

  “I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves,” Thom protested.

  “Sorry,” said Jacob.

  “Of course she will, though,” said Annie. “You’re such a lad, Thom, not to think of that.”

  * * *

  President Bush was coming to Prague for the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and Jacob invited Luboš to be his date for the celebration in Wenceslas Square. They met under the clock of the disco, as was now their custom. The president was not scheduled to speak until two, but at noon the streets were already full. It was a national holiday, and the crowd was merry. A man in a Mao suit was selling a card game called Marxeso, which was played like Concentration; the object was to turn over matching pairs of twentieth-century dictators, who were Communist except for Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein. Girls in peasant dresses were selling cheaply printed copies of the United States Constitution in Czech. The week before, Jacob had tried to teach his students the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, but the difference did not tell here; Bush was being welcomed in a general and symbolic capacity.

  Jacob offered to treat Luboš to pizza at a new, Western-style place near the subway entrance. It was a restaurant where you stood to eat. A waitress came quickly once they found an end free at one of the high tables.

  —Was it like this here last year? Jacob asked.

  —No, people were afraid then, Luboš said. —The police were beating people. Today it is like a game.

  —So you were here.

  —A little, he said, as he had before.

  The dough was chewy, and the tomato sauce heavily sweetened. Soon they were climbing uphill toward a blue-painted stage that had been erected at the top of the square. Government loudspeakers, mounted in the façades of the buildings like fleurons of gunmet
al, had been turned on again for the occasion, and one or two of them crackled meaninglessly because of a short circuit, already out of repair after just a year’s disuse.

  Luboš seemed to be studying the paving stones.

  —You’re silent, Jacob accused.

  —I’m nervous. He glanced around them before explaining: He and Collin had a third partner, another Czech, who had recently gone missing, just as they were about to sign a lease and hand floor plans over to a builder. Luboš had been asked to apply for extensions on all the permissions and licenses that the business required, a task in some ways more difficult than applying for them in the first place.

  —Where is he? Jacob asked.

  —We do not know. Please tell no one.

  —Whom would I tell?

  They stood together awkwardly, leaning against a building a few numbers up from the Hotel Evropa. From time to time Jacob tried to stand on the ledge of a sort of false plinth in the building’s façade, as if he wanted a better view, but in fact as a pretext for putting a hand on Luboš’s shoulder.

  —What will you do, when you return? Luboš asked.

  —That’s far off, Jacob answered lightly.

  —Not so far, I think. Will you return to the office, where you worked?

  —No. In fact Jacob dreaded the burden of earning a living. To be here was something more than a holiday; it was a kind of rift in the net, so new that it was not yet clear how it would be rewoven into the systems of money and responsibility. —I want to write, Jacob added.

  —Ah yes. Does it pay?

  —No, not now.

  A brass band’s rendition of John Philip Sousa issued from speakers above their heads, too loudly at first. Then came George M. Cohan. The embassy must have provided a mix tape. —I too do not know, what I will do, Luboš said, in the Czech he kept simple for Jacob’s sake. —Especially if Collin’s business does not succeed.

  —You could translate.

  —I am a terrible translator, even of German. I am only good enough for this, to help a businessman from abroad. Forgive me. Do not worry; I am not going to cry over it.

  He looked fixedly at Jacob as if daring him to look away. He seemed to be appealing to Jacob for once as an equal, and it filled Jacob with lust. He wanted to pin Luboš to the building they were leaning against. —Do you really need this other man? Jacob asked. In Czech, “the other” is literally “the second,” so Jacob specified, perhaps unnecessarily: —This third man.

  —His name is on all the forms. His name and mine. The Frenchman’s name is nowhere. And we need him even aside from this. All is in great disorder.

  “Je to bordel,” Jacob said in sympathy. Bordel was a mildly vulgar word, which used to describe anything it was her duty to clean up. A mess, as in a brothel.

  —You speak Czech so prettily now, Luboš said. —Like a cabdriver.

  At two o’clock, a few Czech officials seated themselves in folding chairs on stage. Two wore ill-fitting suits, and a third a patterned sweater. It was still a rare thing to see formal clothes of any kind on the streets of Prague. There were almost none for sale in the stores. As a sort of a joke, Jacob sometimes wore a beige knit tie, which he’d thrown into his knapsack in Boston at the last minute, but he almost never saw a tie on other men. The absence was a relief. No one’s clothes signaled that they lived better or higher than you, or that their style was more current. The men on stage, for example, were probably government ministers, but they dressed like clerks in a discount shoe store. A Thoreauvian intellectual might live a little to one side, under such an arrangement, without looking any shabbier than the rest of society. The peculiarity of his ambition would not be visible.

  Another official came to the microphone and announced that President Bush had been unpreventably delayed and would appear as soon as he was able to. After a few minutes, the seated officials exchanged glances, rose, and filed sheepishly off stage. The crowd seemed to pardon them; it was, after all, a very cold day.

  The people in the square fell into the long patience customary in those awaiting a ceremony rather than an entertainment. The music gave them a sense of progress. During the silence after each song, they listened intently, and then, as the next song started, relaxed again into chatter and into fidgeting for warmth. At intervals one of the officials repeated the announcement of the president’s delay and the assurance that he was en route. It pleased Jacob to think of himself as hidden in the crowd—not recognizably American.

  —Your president is as punctual as you.

  —I didn’t vote for him.

  —You were, perhaps, too young.

  —Punishably young, Jacob joked.

  —I’m not afraid, Luboš returned. —The socialist republics are enlightened about youth. You are old enough here to cast your vote as you wish, in that respect at least.

  It was not until four that the Czech officials returned to the stage. This time they remained standing, their hands clasped before them, as if so instructed, while men from the American Secret Service, much more sharply tailored, took the corners of the stage and studied the crowd. Havel’s foreign minister next emerged, followed, at last, by the American president and his entourage. After an introduction, the president read in his plaintive, nasal voice from a short script, pausing for the interpreter at the end of each clause with a practiced air, as if he himself found the resonance of the phrases reassuring and even enjoyed their echo in another language. He said only platitudes, yet Jacob felt nonetheless a prickling on the back of his neck at the old words in their Yankee cadences, and a pride in thinking that his was the country invited to represent democracy, not France or Britain. Later, when he learned a little history, he realized that the Czechs and Slovaks couldn’t have invited the leaders of those countries; in 1938, Daladier and Chamberlain had betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler. At the time, though, he only understood America’s presence in Bush’s person vaguely, and not altogether inaccurately, as a recognition of something like its purity of spirit.

  In their mere politeness, the president’s words left the crowd with nothing to discuss, and when the stage was cleared, people fell thoughtlessly into streets and arcades that would take them away from the square. Jacob felt a little giddy. He was at the right distance from his country, he thought. This was where he wanted to see it from. Even the insipidity of Bush’s speech pleased him; it reflected America’s stability and confidence, and it suggested that it was safe to stay away. There weren’t going to be any turns in the story that he’d want to be on hand for. In the general dispersal, he and Luboš drifted north and soon found themselves in view of the chief train station, named for Woodrow Wilson. There was a park in front, which Jacob hadn’t noticed before. At this time of year the flowerbeds were empty, but on the northern side of the park there were crudely trimmed shrubs and a thin shelter of trees.

  —Kuba, what are you looking for? Luboš asked.

  —I want to see the statue.

  He was already ten paces ahead of Luboš. He could tell it wasn’t really a nice park. At the edges of the sidewalk, wind had collected cigarette butts and wrinkled wads of the wax paper that fries and mayonnaise were served in. It occurred to Jacob that he didn’t often see litter in downtown Prague. This trash came from the train station, probably. In a minute he would let Luboš lead him away, but first he wanted to take a closer look at the statue, which seemed to represent a soldier in a flowing coat standing beside—yes, how strange—standing beside another man, and embracing him.

  —It is unsuitable here, Luboš said, awkwardly, upon catching up.

  There was no plaque. Jacob walked around the statue, to see it from all angles. The soldier’s rifle, hanging from a shoulder strap, fell between the men, separating them like the mythic sword that lovers are always sleeping on either side of, and the soldier’s left leg strode forward, decisively, as if to signal that the embrace would not slow his march. The stride turned the soldier’s cock and balls chastely away from his admirer, who seemed to
be rushing toward him with a desperate hunger.

  —Do you know, what it is? Jacob asked.

  —It is for the liberation from the Germans.

  Now Jacob saw the Soviet star on the breast of the soldier’s uniform. The Russian, who was taller, had to bend his head deeply to place his kiss, which was sheltered by the men’s arms. The Czech’s face, too, was almost entirely obscured. Jacob wondered if it were possible to enjoy the statue the way tourists did when they bought Soviet Army overcoats and badges on Charles Bridge—as a trophy of sorts, and as kitsch. But he decided that the passion it represented was too bodily; there could be no room in his understanding of it for irony, except at the expense of the aspect that most interested him. An image had been widely circulated, the year before, of Honecker and Brezhnev kissing; Jacob saw that one could make that kind of joke about this statue. He didn’t want to, yet he was not ready to see himself in the statue, either.

  —Are they lovers? Jacob asked.

  —I don’t know, Luboš said. —It is not good to be here.

  —Why not?

  —Because of men from the train station. Men and boys.

  Jacob shrugged. —Such people aren’t dangerous. Is the statue pleasing to you?

  —No, Luboš answered. The sun had set, and it was hard to read anything in his expression besides his diplomatic smile. —Let’s go.

  They walked together silently toward Republiky. Neither of them had a coat warm enough for the night. —Shall we have dinner? Jacob asked.

  —I must home, Luboš said.

  —May I come, too?

  —No.

  Jacob wanted to embrace him as in the sculpture but didn’t dare. When they were alone Luboš was tender and put hands on him so gently. Outside, their tenderness was hidden, though they carried it with them nonetheless, like a ballpoint pen of Jacob’s that had once slipped through a hole in his coat pocket into the lining, so that it was always near to hand, though he never retrieved it.