Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  He would call Daniel. He took his calling card out of his wallet, put another crown in the phone, and dialed his American telephone company’s access number for Czechoslovakia. Since the machine had a rotary dial, he had to say aloud to the operator both his calling card number and Daniel’s number, which he still knew by heart. The phone rang, and his throat tightened, as it always did when he called Daniel, for fear of saying the wrong thing. It would be lunchtime there. He would have to disguise the impulse of the call, he thought hurriedly, because if Daniel knew it, he would express disappointment. But he wanted to confess his impulse and to have Daniel be kind to him for once.

  Daniel’s machine answered. Jacob left a plain message, in the hope that Daniel might be home, hear his voice, and pick up, but he didn’t pick up. Jacob finished speaking and was left alone again. The night was putting a chill on him. The same sorrow began to well up in him, but he choked it off, became angry at Daniel for having once more failed him. The familiarity of the anger was a consolation; it was enough of one, at any rate, to carry him back to his rooms, where he was able to make a dinner—some fried sausage, a spoonful of red cabbage from a jar, a peeled carrot, and two toasted and buttered slices of brown caraway-seed bread—and recover some of his strength.

  Until bedtime he read Stendhal. He had put it aside when he began to try to learn Czech in earnest, because it was too much of an effort to read a book in one foreign language at the end of a day spent learning another, but now, beside the medieval travelogue he had forced himself to choose at the Clementinum, it seemed the lesser of two evils, and the effort it required helped to abstract him.

  He fell asleep with difficulty and awoke a few hours later into an unpleasant and complete alertness. His sleeping mind had somehow stumbled onto the thought that it was possible for him to die here. He wasn’t thinking of any specific threat; it was almost a mathematical sort of realization—the longer he stayed, the higher the odds of dying here—but he wanted to die at home. It frightened him a little to discover he had such a strong opinion about where he wanted to die, and since he was alone, he decided there would be no embarrassment—he wouldn’t be burdening any witnesses with it; there was no Daniel present to construe it as an appeal—in letting himself cry openly.

  After a few minutes of this he began to feel better. He got up to wash his face and pour himself a glass of water. Because the feelings in the last few hours had been so potent and their shifts so sudden, it occurred to him to write a short story about them. After all, his development as a writer was the justification he gave himself for staying abroad, and he’d written almost nothing so far. He took a pen and paper and made some notes. He decided to imagine that he had reached Daniel on the telephone. Perhaps the Daniel of the story would feel a little guilty, would worry that his hardness of heart had set Jacob wandering. No, that was implausible; Daniel was beyond guilt. After Jacob had spent the night with him, Daniel had told the story to his boyfriend as an amusement rather than as a confession. Jacob yawned; the anxiety that had awoken him was receding. Perhaps the Daniel of the story could be different, though, more like the Daniel who sometimes surprised him. He had so many thoughts about Daniel, and it had been so long since he had allowed himself to think them. His emotions hadn’t really been engaged here in Prague, only distracted, he said to himself; it had not actually been life. As he set down his pen and returned to bed, he decided he would go with Annie to Berlin.

  * * *

  It was late morning when they settled into their train compartment, and they collapsed at once into the pleasant, premature fatigue that follows a successful morning departure, especially one achieved with only minutes to spare—by the time they had reached the train station, they had been cheerfully shouting at each other to hurry—and that serves as a kind of blanket to protect the traveler from the strangeness and emptiness that follow.

  They had the compartment to themselves. Once outside Prague, they saw that a light frost lay on the ground, not on the exposed clay of the railroad embankment itself but on the grasses that rolled away from it. The modernity of the city had stopped abruptly at its border; the train was carrying them through pastures, farmlands, and occasionally a village—a few boxy white stucco houses and a rusty car in the crook of a hill’s elbow. The steady, muffled clatter of the train reassured and calmed them. “Kontroll bíjety,” a boyish conductor announced, in European pidgin, as he slid open their compartment door on its rattling casters and propped it open, somewhat rakishly, with one foot.

  “Prosím,” Annie said, surrendering her ticket, and asked Jacob, aside, “Do they think we’re German now?”

  “I do not think, that you are German,” the conductor interposed.

  “Sorry, I had no idea you spoke English. How rude of me.”

  “Not at all, madam.” He tipped his hat and was gone.

  They decided to eat the lunches they had packed, though it was still a little early. Annie had brought a thermos of coffee, hot, and another of milk, cold, and an extra cup for Jacob. She also had oranges, a salad of cucumber and tomatoes, and a tin of sardines. Jacob, who abstained from the sardines, had brought a soft cheese, a salami that had recommended one day when their paths crossed at the butcher’s, and half a loaf of bread, as well as a knife to cut them with, wrapped for safety in his towel, since the knife didn’t fold. For dessert he had brought two small plastic pots of smetanový krém, a sort of sweetened crème fraîche.

  “We’d have had to eat soon anyway,” Jacob rationalized, “because the krém wouldn’t have stayed cold.”

  “You know it’s for children, Jacob. I mean, with ladybirds and butterflies and such like on the packages.”

  They dozed; they read. At the border the train stopped for half an hour while two teams of border guards, first larkish Czechs and then impassive Germans, inspected passports. As the train drifted into motion again, Jacob sat up to see if the landscape would change, and it did: now all the roofs of the little houses were red, as if by regulation. The trees were more neatly trimmed and even, in places, pollarded. Cars, when he saw them, were brightly polished. By a subtle change, the hills, which were steeper, and the villages, which were even more ingeniously placed, now looked strangely familiar to Jacob, who recalled that his great-grandfather had immigrated to Texas from Germany and that his grandmother knew German because it had been spoken in her childhood home. He wondered if it was here that he ought to have come in the first place.

  Annie interrupted his reverie. “Is your heart set on Berlin, then?”

  “I thought yours was.”

  She leaned toward the window for a better view, tugging the gray-green curtain out of her way with a quick hand, and her face was lit up by a reflection from a field of uncut straw. “It’s just that it’s something of a challenge to go back to a place sometimes. I wish you would come tonight after all.” They had discussed this. She had a plan to meet some of her old friends, and Jacob had decided to explore Berlin’s gay nightlife. “Instead of foraging.”

  “Foraging?”

  “Pillaging. Whatever it is that you do. But you need to make up your mind too, I suppose.”

  “You could come with me.”

  “No, I would have to face them eventually if I moved here. I’ll go by myself. I only asked the ones I want to see.”

  They fell silent. Annie slipped off her shoes and pulled her feet up beside her on the banquette. The train slowed but did not stop for a small station house in yellow stone with a mansard roof and bricked-up windows.

  “You know, in some ways I find it’s much better in Prague than it was for me in Berlin. It’s more steady, with the group that we have.”

  “We don’t have to move.”

  When they alighted at Berlin Lichtenberg, they quarreled, because Annie wanted to board an elevated train just pulling in upstairs, and Jacob, feeling cautious, insisted on standing in front of the grand transit map of the city posted beside the ticket booth and puzzling out their route. According to the
map, more than one elevated train passed through the station, as well as an underground train. But that was as much as Jacob could figure out. Before leaving Prague, he had memorized the name of the stop nearest the tourist bureau where they hoped to reserve inexpensive rooms, and he couldn’t find it anywhere on the map.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “How peculiar,” Annie agreed, after he had asked her to help him search and she too had failed.

  They felt rising in them the slow panic that hunger for dinner brings in travelers who don’t yet know where they are going to sleep. A German man, as if sensing their anxiety, came forward offering “Zimmer, zimmer,” but they waved him away. It was a gray, cheerless station; the floors were dusty and the paint was peeling off the walls. Jacob marched them outside, over Annie’s protests, in search of a street sign so that he could locate them on a map of the two Berlins that he had bought in Prague. The burden of their luggage aggravated their sense of unease and vulnerability. The street name they found wasn’t listed in the index of Jacob’s map.

  “I’m not going any farther, Jacob. Shall we go back inside and ask at the ticket window?”

  The ticket seller took money from them and pointed to the track where Annie had wanted to board the elevated in the first place.

  “I told you.”

  “I thought people would speak English here,” Jacob said.

  “Oh, they do, in Berlin. But this is East Berlin, and very much so, in my opinion.”

  Inside the elevated train, a new transit map explained the mystery: Before unification, the transit systems of East and West Berlin had intersected at only one station. Only that station had appeared on the maps of both cities; there had been no need to remind riders of the existence of places they could not visit. In the new map, the two webs now touched along one filament, hesitantly, and Jacob was able to see both the station where they had boarded and the one near the tourist bureau. He saw, too, that the map that he’d bought in Prague had been no help because it didn’t really show both cities; it showed only as much of East Berlin as was unavoidably included by a rectangle large enough to contain all of West Berlin. It was merely an old map of West Berlin that had been opportunistically relabeled.

  The eastern city lay below, in white, cold, massive buildings that turned away from them like the spokes of a great turbine as the elevated train took a curve. The architecture looked as grand and sober as cemetery marble.

  “There’s no one about, is there,” Annie remarked. “But then it’s midday in winter. You know, we could have stayed in East Berlin. It would have been less dear.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You sometimes give the impression that you don’t much care for socialism, Jacob.”

  The western city now wheeled toward them, and they saw that it was crawling with traffic and spotted with advertising. The quiet in the car around them became fragile, like an egg to be cracked.

  “Gah, it’s wonderful,” said Annie.

  They descended into the hum of the city in a sort of intoxication.

  * * *

  That night found Jacob sitting in a Kreuzberg café, reading.

  “With his book he is like Alice,” said a man nearby. He spoke in English so Jacob would take notice.

  “Alice didn’t have a book,” Jacob protested, and shut John Mandeville.

  “No, didn’t she? In the underground?” The man and a friend of his laughed.

  “But you know where you are, don’t you,” said a third man. He was lanky, with pale skin, a large nose, and fine, sandy hair. Like the others, he was in his thirties. “Don’t listen to these silly old queens.”

  “What have you called us? You are too bad.”

  “He is for me. I spoke to him the first.”

  “But he doesn’t want you,” the sandy-haired man again intervened. “Am I right?”

  “He’s not the one I would choose,” Jacob answered. At this the two silly ones laughed even more.

  When it was late enough, the sandy-haired man, who said his name was Markus, left the café with Jacob and took him to a club in the top floor of a factory building, a loft space with cement floors and ceiling-high, many-paned windows. The room was dark, loud, full, and hot, and the lights of the city glittered outside, a low-hanging constellation that Jacob already felt he was coming to know.

  “This is the great place to come now, if you are gay,” Markus said. “You see I am showing you the sights.” He seemed to be making fun of his own generosity. He was careful not to make any claim on Jacob, not to expect any return for his courtesy.

  Jacob looked over the other men in the club with open hunger and curiosity. It seemed a place to be unabashed. He didn’t know if he wanted Markus or one of the others.

  “How is it you speak such pretty German?”

  “I speak absurd German. You’re not even pretending to speak German to me.”

  “But your pronunciation is beautiful.”

  “And how about your English.”

  “I spent a year in America. And I am an actor. It is my job to learn accents.”

  “I would never learn German if I moved here. Everyone speaks perfect English.”

  The conversation was only a pretext for studying each other’s eyes. Jacob felt lightheaded. He had decided an hour ago that he couldn’t afford to spend any more deutschmarks on beer, but Markus had continued to buy beers for both of them. There was a lovely sense of being cut off, unrecognized. In Boston some of the clubs had tried to offer this impersonality but hadn’t managed it.

  Overhead lights flickered on and off. “It is closing soon,” Markus explained. “Now is what I call tiger time. The great beasts pad about, eyeing one another, trying to make up their minds at last.”

  To Jacob it seemed as if Markus had given voice to the small indifference that still kept them apart, and it made him want to end it. He pulled Markus toward him and they began to kiss. There was no clumsiness, as there was with Luboš.

  “Let’s go to my place,” Markus suggested. Jacob became aware that they were standing in the center of the room and that the lights were on steadily now, but he saw in Markus’s expression that his suggestion came not from embarrassment but eagerness.

  * * *

  The sun came in heavily through the curtainless windows and woke Jacob. Markus was stepping into trousers. “Forgive me, I must go to work.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Would you like tea? Lemon? Honey?”

  “Sure,” Jacob answered. Markus was unbuttoning a shirt in order to put it on. “What is this?” Jacob asked, lightly touching a painted circle under Markus’s skin in the small of his back.

  “It’s a mantra. Do you know what that is? It’s a saying that you repeat during meditation.”

  Jacob had known the word but didn’t mind being given a lesson. “How does it go?”

  Markus uttered the syllables.

  “And what does it mean?”

  “‘The lotus rises from the swamp,’” Markus said quickly, as if he would rather not have said it.

  “I’m sorry. Is it a secret?”

  Markus laughed. “No, no.”

  The sun washed the wood of the floors almost white. Jacob pulled sheets around him for cover; the apartment was only a few stories up from the street and the mattress was higher than Jacob was used to, as if atop a pedestal, because it had been placed above a sort of bureau-wardrobe in order to economize floor space. Beside a desk stood a small bookcase of plays in German and English, and Jacob began to read the titles. It was a real home. It was as if Jacob had been given a passkey to the inside of life in Berlin, as if he had been accepted into a kind of freemasonry.

  “Here you are.” Markus carefully handed up a tea tray. When Jacob took it, in his unsteady hands, the cup rattled loudly in the saucer until he set it on the bed beside him. “You may stay as long as you like; the door will lock by itself behind you. There is a towel in the shower, and here is my phone number.”


  “I don’t have a phone number myself, or I would give it to you.”

  “You are traveling.”

  “Maybe I can see you again before I go back?”

  “Excellent,” Markus answered, but he did not suggest a plan, as if he feared Jacob, as his guest, might be speaking only out of politeness. “And please, here is for a taxi. Czech crowns do not go very far, and I have brought you to a different part of town from where I found you.”

  Jacob scarcely remembered having told Markus that he was living in Prague. “No, please, that’s not necessary,” Jacob said weakly. In fact he had no idea where he was, and with the money in sight, he felt a little greed for it and didn’t see why he shouldn’t take it.

  Markus saw his hesitation. “Yes, take it; don’t be ridiculous.”

  They said good-bye, not tenderly, but as if their parting might break into another round of activity. Left alone, Jacob climbed back into bed and dozed, enjoying his nakedness, which was novel to him, because he never slept naked in his own bed. He remembered the tea. Annie would have a good idea where he was, but he shouldn’t keep her waiting. He took a leisurely shower.

  Before leaving, he stepped into the living room, because he hadn’t seen it yet. Its formality reminded him that he hadn’t been invited into it, so he looked no more than hurriedly at the leather armchair, Bokhara rug, glass coffee table. In a painting, placed on a wall the sun wouldn’t hit, was a tangle of reds and oranges. It called forth no response in Jacob; he felt only that he shouldn’t be looking at it, that he was loitering. A neighbor would look through a window and think a thief had got into the apartment.

  * * *

  When the taxi came, it was a German car that in America would have been considered a luxury model. It was clean, and no barrier separated the front and back seats. The young driver asked if Jacob would like to hear music; a Mendelssohn song without words was playing softly on the radio. When Jacob agreed, the driver turned it up. Jacob felt that he had slipped somehow into an atmosphere of solidity and consideration that he couldn’t have purchased in Prague and that he couldn’t have afforded even if it were for sale there—that he probably couldn’t have afforded even in America—yet he and the atmosphere seemed to recognize each other. He fell into it comfortably; he somehow felt it was due him. He knew he would step out of it when the taxi put him down at the door of the hostel. In America it was the privilege of a life he had decided he didn’t want, of deferments and compromises, but he hadn’t quite faced up to the idea of going without it always, and he had been hoping to leave the question behind when he left America, along with the question he faced in bars. Markus made his living as an actor. No, Jacob corrected himself, he hadn’t said that; he had only said he was an actor. Jacob didn’t know for certain that it was to a theater that Markus had had to go so punctually on a Friday morning.