Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “This is so exciting.” He shivered as the warmth of the vehicle began to reach him through his coat.

  “I am glad. I forget that it’s an adventure to go for a drive when you haven’t done for a while.” She looked behind her as they edged out from the curb. “We ought to go for a proper one some day. There must be a castle you haven’t seen yet.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” They drove uphill behind a slow, fat bus, composed of two carriages joined in the middle by accordion-like pleats of black rubber. They watched its rear bob up and down in a leisurely way.

  “I believe he’s obliged to change lanes ahead,” Melinda narrated. “Yes.” The car growled as she forced it around the shifting bus. “That’s the bus you’ll take, though you may have to change to a tram.”

  Jacob added, “Where’d you get the car, anyway?”

  “It’s me mum’s. She says she’d rather it were here than in London, because she saves on the insurance. Of course that’s only what she says. I fancy her real concern is to ensure that I’m bringing an asset of value to the marriage. The nonmarriage. What have you. To give me leverage, you understand. That’s an American word, isn’t it—‘leverage’? At least it feels American. Every daughter comes with a cow, that sort of thing.”

  “How’d you get it here?”

  “I drove it. Fifteen bloody hours. But if ever I decide to pack it in with , all I need do is drive away. That is pleasant to think of, some days. If Rafe were to take up with that tart who answers the phones at the defense ministry, as he threatens to, for example.”

  “Does he really?”

  “Yes but no. His taste in women is far too nice. But he likes to pretend that he could be vulgar. Like all men.” A light was changing ahead; she slowed the car by downshifting. “Say, that’s a rather self-flattering thing to have said, isn’t it. About his taste. Giving myself backhanded compliments, now.”

  “But if the shoe fits…”

  “I don’t know where I am this afternoon.”

  “Literally?”

  “No, I do know that we turn here. I’m quite good with maps, for a girl. As even Rafe will attest.”

  They turned into a lane that ran through an empty block. Perhaps the expanse had been intended for a lawn; there didn’t seem to be any grass on it, however. There was just a thin crust of ice—the kind of dirty shellac that forms when a covering of snow melts by day and refreezes by night—pulling away from orange, sandy soil. At the end of the lane they turned right, into a parking lot in front of a nondescript concrete building from the 1950s.

  When Jacob got out, his legs felt heavy and he stomped his feet. The view of the sky was unobstructed on all sides, and the evenly quilted, colorless blanket of cloud above them glowed softly with the light that it was holding back. Melinda didn’t put on her coat until she got out of the car, and even then she didn’t fasten its clasps. Her nonchalance was an ornament to her beauty, and her fingers whitened with cold as she put her purse on the hood—on the “bonnet,” as she called it—and fussed in it to make sure of a document she thought they might need. Admiring her, Jacob felt something like pride in her fine looks. There was no one feature that you would single out; the delicacy was in all of them and in the play and balance between them. The pleasure of having her as his friend went to his head a little. If he had been straight, he might have worried about falling in love.

  “It’s always gray here, isn’t it,” he said. “That’s what they don’t tell you.”

  “Oh goodness, you sound like Annie.” She held up a folded letter. “I have my original introduction to the institute here. It says nothing about you, of course, but I find that it’s often of service to have a piece of paper of some kind, even if it isn’t strictly speaking pertinent.”

  She was passing on to Jacob an English class that she had been teaching privately. The students were research chemists. Without meaning to, she had spontaneously privatized the lessons a month and a half before, by threatening to quit; the chemists had coaxed her to stay by offering to pay her in cash out of their own pockets.

  In the lobby the floor was black marble, and there was an abstract brass sculpture, loopy and gobby, which, it occurred to Jacob, may have referred to the different shapes that electrons’ orbits are supposed to have: s, p, d, f. A small, thin man with flat blond hair rose from a banquette to greet them.

  “Hello,” the man said, careful to give the English o the color that it didn’t have in Czech. “This is your friend?”

  “My replacement, superior in every way. Ivan, Jacob. Jacob, Ivan.”

  “We are hearing many good things about you,” Ivan continued. “We are very excited for your lessons.”

  “I hope I don’t disappoint you too badly.”

  “Pardon?” For a moment the man was at a loss. “Ah, you are joking, I see.” He laughed politely.

  “He’s an excellent teacher,” Melinda interposed, and then, sotto voce, appearing to mumble to herself as she looked again into her purse, instructed Jacob: “No irony quite yet, darling.” Then, in a clearer voice: “Say, Ivan, I do have this letter still, if you think it will be of use.”

  “Letter?” He glanced at it to puzzle out her meaning. “Oh, it will not be necessary. It is now a private arrangement.” He named the sum that the chemists were willing to pay for an hour’s lesson. Melinda had told Jacob the number in advance. It seemed almost too generous: if Jacob taught the chemists once a week, they would be paying him almost a third of what he earned at school. But Melinda had assured him that this was now the going rate for private English lessons.

  “Brilliant,” Melinda said. “I shall abandon you to their mercies now, Jacob. Take good care of him, Ivan.”

  “So soon?” Jacob asked. He meant for the question to sound humorous.

  “Don’t worry, they’re awfully chatty,” she reassured him. “They’ll scarcely even let you teach them.” They embraced, and she was gone.

  “Please,” Ivan said, and escorted Jacob down a hall. They walked past several signs forbidding visitors, past the entrance to what seemed to be a cafeteria, and through a set of double doors into a large conference room.

  * * *

  A gaudy, mildly asymmetric chandelier of chrome and glass, which would not have looked out of place at the top of a Christmas tree in an American shopping mall, hung over a long oval table of dark-stained maple. The bulbs of the chandelier were reflected dully in the table’s polish, and as Ivan led Jacob to the front of the room, this irregular constellation slid along the surface as if following him. The eyes of the institute’s chemists also followed. The chemists were sitting in deep, leather-cushioned chairs, winged with side headrests like the chairs of astronauts in movies. Ivan, who looked about thirty, seemed to be one of the youngest in the group. The oldest, in their seventies at least, wore white lab coats and were sitting together at the table’s far end; they politely suspended a conversation as Jacob entered. Thick curtains blocked the daylight from a row of tall windows. Behind Jacob there were carefully washed blackboards.

  “This is a nice room,” Jacob said, trying to make the best of its heaviness.

  “It was the director’s, but we have no director now,” said a tiny old man. His hair, dyed black, was neatly parted and combed, and the frames of his glasses were made of black plastic and steel. As he spoke, in a high and for a Czech unusually musical voice, with an almost German accent, he gestured with his liver-spotted hands. “Now it is the people’s.”

  “Not the people’s,” corrected a man in his forties a few seats to the right of Jacob. He was wearing a suit that actually seemed to fit him, but he slouched in his chair and as he spoke scowled at his notebook like a teenager, as perhaps the effort of speaking English made him feel that he was.

  “The people’s of chemistry!” the old man revised, and there were chuckles around the room, and whispers of surreptitious translation.

  Ivan posed a grammatical question: “Is it correct to say ‘the people’s of chem
istry’? Or should it be ‘the people of chemistry’s’?”

  Jacob repeated the two phrases aloud. “Neither, actually,” he decided, and the chemists laughed as if this were a great joke. “I’d get around it by saying, ‘It belongs to the people of chemistry.’ Or, ‘It’s the scientists’ rather than the administrators’.’”

  “The administrators,” the man in the nice suit echoed, still scowling, as if Jacob had just taught him the name of his enemies.

  “This room is too fine for science,” said a plump old woman. She spoke very slowly, summoning up each word with a separate breath. The room was obliged to wait for her, and Jacob felt the pity that one feels when an older person tests a group’s patience without meaning to. The many lines in her face were soft and hesitant, like her voice. “We will ruin it,” she continued, “with our dirty fingers.” When she reached the last word, she smiled with relief at having finished and with pleasure at her own joke.

  “What did they keep in the cabinets?” asked another chemist, swiveling in his chair with childish speed to point at a wall of them at the back of the room. The abstract quality of speech in a foreign language seemed to be making them giddy.

  “Bones!” cried the tiny old man.

  “The bones of the people of chemistry,” said the man in the nice suit.

  “The bones,” the tiny old man resumed, in a further refinement, “of former administrators!”

  Jacob asked the chemists to introduce themselves. They gave their first names, listening to one another attentively, while he jotted down a seating chart. The tiny old man was named Bohumil; the plump old woman, Zdenka; and the man in the suit, Pavel. Some spoke English brokenly; others, fluently, even expressively. Pavel, for example, spoke it as easily as he wore his suit, but with a certain brusqueness, as if his ease with such surfaces was an accomplishment he had until recently been holding back and he still suspected that he could be attacked for it. Whenever he spoke, in the hour that followed, his scowl caused Jacob to worry that he was losing patience with the lesson, but Pavel never said anything to confirm this interpretation.

  Jacob chose a lesson he had recently given to one of his intermediate classes, about the way word order changes when a question is embedded in another sentence. The chemists listened to a taped dialogue; they read from photocopied pages that Jacob passed around. As an exercise, they were then to take turns acting out a simple dialogue in pairs. One person was to ask his partner about an item, and then the partner was to ask why he was asking.

  Jacob had learned the language teacher’s trick of selecting prompt words with an unexpected relevance. “The potatoes,” he prompted Ivan, who, proud of his role as Jacob’s escort, had seated himself beside Jacob.

  “Frank, do you have the potatoes?” Ivan asked, anglicizing his neighbor’s name.

  František, an older man, considered. “Why are you asking,” he began, and looked to Jacob, who nodded in encouragement, “me,” and waited for a second nod, “if I have the potatoes?”

  “Great,” Jacob said.

  “Because I cannot buy them in the store,” Ivan answered.

  “The data,” Jacob said, hoping it was a word that the chemists used in their workaday conversations.

  “Pavel, do you have the data?” asked a woman who, though young and pretty, wore a white lab coat as otherwise only the older chemists did.

  “Why are you asking if I have the data?” Pavel returned, and he gave the line a hint of petulance, as if he really were a well-dressed man bickering with an attractive woman.

  “Because the instruments are not accurate,” the woman said. The group hadn’t been expecting an extra line of dialogue from her, and they laughed.

  “Pardon me,” said Pavel. “Can you say, please, what is the difference between ‘accurate’ and another word, ‘precise’?”

  “What the difference is,” Jacob corrected, to stall for time.

  “Ah yes. It is a question inside a sentence. Then, can you say what the difference is?”

  Jacob felt the chemists’ eyes studying him. “Precise. Accurate,” he repeated, but he couldn’t hear the answer in his own voice, as he sometimes could. “Is there a difference?” he asked himself aloud.

  “A colleague told me, that there was a difference,” Pavel said. He sounded anxious, as if he were afraid that Jacob might call his question foolish.

  The room fell silent. Jacob wondered if it was a test. It occurred to him that since the chemists were paying him out of their own pockets, they had a right to find out if he knew what he was talking about. This might be the first time any of them had tried to exercise such a right.

  “The colleague and I were discussing a number,” Pavel continued, all the while frowning. He did not look willing to release Jacob from the question. “I said that the number was accurate. He said, ‘Yes, of course, but is it precise?’”

  Jacob saw the answer now, and in his relief also saw his questioner more clearly. Pavel’s hands were trembling. His question was a sort of public confession. He had been left at a disadvantage in a contest with another man, and he had carried the memory of the conversation with him for a long time afterward, the way a child carries a parent’s incautious remark if it senses that the parent will be reluctant to explain. He was not trying to test Jacob. He was hoping that Jacob would be able to pull the sting.

  Jacob came up with an example. “Suppose that my temperature is thirty-nine point two.” He wrote the number on the blackboard. “If my thermometer says forty-one”—he wrote that number on the blackboard and then crossed it out—“it’s not accurate. If it says thirty-nine,”—he wrote a 39 beneath the crossed-out 41—“then it’s accurate but not precise.” He then added a decimal point and a 2 after the 39, and circled the full number. “But a reading of thirty-nine point two is accurate and precise. Thirty-nine point two five would be even more precise. And so on.”

  Pavel nodded. There was a buzzing at either side of him as the words for temperature and thermometer were translated and as the scientists reminded one another that American numerals had periods where Czech numerals had commas.

  Ivan raised his hand. “And if the thermometer says forty-one point seven eight, it is precise but not accurate?”

  A few moments ago they had doubted Jacob; now he was in danger of becoming their oracle. “No,” Jacob pronounced. “I would know what you meant if you said that, but no. A precise measurement is always an accurate one.”

  Pavel fell back into his astronaut’s chair. “I am accurate when I say that the words ‘precise’ and ‘accurate’ are the same. But I am more precise when I say, that they are different.”

  The pretty young woman beside Pavel held her head for a few moments in perplexity. She dropped her hands into her lap when she understood. —That’s it, she congratulated him in Czech.

  “Let’s get back to the exercise,” Jacob said, and they allowed him to return their attention to word order in interrogative relative clauses.

  Jacob proposed dialogues about eggs, a car, and privatization coupons. When he proposed tickets, however, Bohumil, the tiny old man, whose turn it was, asked, “May I choose another word?”

  Jacob allowed him to.

  “Zdenka,” Bohumil said, turning to the plump old woman, who happened to be sitting beside him, “ask me about the girlfriend.”

  The old woman blinked calmly and sat up straight in her chair. Jacob was afraid that in her preoccupation with the mechanics of the grammar she might not have noticed Bohumil’s introduction of the premise for a joke.

  “A girlfriend,” Jacob corrected, but the correction came too late for Bohumil to respond without interrupting Zdenka.

  “O Bohumil, do you have,” began Zdenka, in her labored way, “your girlfriend?” She had tried at the last minute to avoid Bohumil’s mistake.

  “A girlfriend,” Jacob corrected again.

  “O Bohumil,” she began over again, “do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Good!” said Jacob.


  “Why are you asking me if I have a girlfriend?” Bohumil quickly replied.

  “Good,” Jacob praised him, to be evenhanded.

  Bohumil continued: “Who told you?” Some of the chemists chuckled.

  “Because,” Zdenka answered, with the fingers of her right hand stretched out in anticipation, “she left keys.”

  “Her keys,” Jacob supplied. Evidently Bohumil knew who he was joking with.

  “Because she left her keys,” repeated Zdenka, at her own indomitable pace. “Is it now to me?”

  “It can be your turn, sure.”

  “Is it my turn?” she corrected herself, before proceeding. “O Bohumil, ask me about a boyfriend.”

  “Zdenka, do you have a boyfriend?” Bohumil turned to her as he asked the question and looked at her over his glasses for added effect.

  “Why are you asking,” Zdenka responded, not returning his gaze but sitting erect in her chair, with grandmotherly innocence, her eyes fixed on a spot in the ceiling, “me if I have a boyfriend?” She took an extra breath. “I, too, have a girlfriend!”

  Over the outburst of further laughter and of commentary in Czech, Bohumil asked Jacob, “How do you say, osvobodit, osvobozená?”

  “Liberate. Liberated.”

  “My wife is a liberated woman,” Bohumil said proudly.

  “Aha,” said Jacob.

  “And she is young and pretty,” Zdenka concluded, beaming with her triumph, “my girlfriend.”

  “It’s like vaudeville in here,” Jacob observed.

  “Czech vaudeville,” said Bohumil. “Do you know Voskovec and Werich?”

  “No,” Jacob admitted.

  “Ah, you would like them, I think. They were First Republic.” He folded his hands thoughtfully. “Like us,” he added, pointing to himself and Zdenka.

  “Will you tell us something about yourself?” Ivan asked, a little plaintively. “Since how long are you here?”

  “How long have you been here,” Jacob corrected, though he saw that teaching had become a lost cause. “Since August.”

  “And are you a teacher in America?”