Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “I think this is it,” Carl suggested. “Behind here.” He paced the length of the hoarding, in search of a seam through which to glimpse the building. “I don’t know if it’s right behind. It might be behind behind.”

  “There are a lot of buildings that are open,” Jacob said. “Quite beautiful buildings.”

  Carl didn’t take the hint. “Do you know the opera?”

  “The opera house?”

  “No, the opera.”

  “No,” Jacob confessed.

  “You should listen to it sometime,” Carl said softly. In Boston it had been part of Carl’s chic, Jacob remembered, to like works of art that a sophisticated uncle might have been enthusiastic about. In Boston he had introduced Jacob to Astrud Gilberto and to Auden. “The list. The lover versus the father. Versus death.”

  “I saw the Miloš Forman movie.”

  “There you go.” While remembering the music, Carl seemed to be seeing something other than the cold, gray street they stood in, and Jacob felt envious. “Should we climb over?” Carl asked.

  “No,” Jacob answered with alarm.

  “If you fold your hands and make a kind of stirrup…”

  “No. I don’t want to get arrested.”

  “They’re not going to arrest us. We’re Americans. They love us.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “It’s good for us. That’s why the Stehlíks rent to us, isn’t it?”

  “They get money.”

  “But they don’t need money. Everything’s paid for.”

  “They don’t know for how long.”

  “It’s like a cargo cult,” Carl insisted. “You bring home an American and you put him on the mantelpiece for luck.”

  Jacob led Carl back to Melantrichova, a street so narrow that in places the buildings on either side were buttressed against each other, two or three stories above their heads. They followed the curl of the street, marshaled closely by ashlar until abruptly the stone walls fell away, and they were released into the expanse of . A group of tourists had already collected to admire the famous clock, but Jacob drew Carl into the openness of the square itself.

  “This is where the Czech nobility was executed,” he said, repeating something Rafe and Melinda had told him.

  “It’s like cupcakes,” Carl answered.

  A cold sun had lit up the yellow, pink, and green facades of the Baroque palaces that edged the square. “There’s a sort of war, you know, in Prague,” Jacob said, “between the simple and the pretty.”

  “Really?” They were walking slowly together, their steps matching now. The Týn church watched them from behind a row of low palaces, like an antlered deer, shy at their approach, waiting just inside a thicket. Their steps turned naturally toward a great bronze-and-stone monument in the northeast of the square. “Who’s that?” Carl asked.

  “Jan Hus.”

  “And he’s one of the simple ones?” Carl guessed.

  At the base the martyr was almost indistinct from the metal of which he was formed, and he seemed to rise from it, indignantly. His fingers were thick as if from labor, though he had been a scholar. “I think so,” Jacob answered. “He was sort of a Protestant before there were Protestants.” Hus stood apart from the other figures, breaking the symmetry.

  “He’s the sort of statue who could take you to hell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like the statue in Don Juan. Did they kill him, too?”

  “They burnt him at the stake.”

  “Intense.”

  As they circled the monument, so close to it that they lost track as they walked of how much of it they had seen and how much remained undiscovered, Jacob hung back and let Carl take the lead. One of Hus’s followers reached out a hand in his misery, so that the hand projected beyond the frame that the rest of the statue implied, and Carl raised one of his toward it, as if for comparison. His hand looked frail beside the statue’s, with its knotty fingers.

  “Hus was two centuries earlier than the nobles killed over there,” Jacob felt obliged to explain. “But it all runs together in the national myth.”

  Carl leaned back and looked up to find Hus’s line of sight. “He’s staring at these pretty buildings you don’t like.”

  “I like them,” Jacob said. “There’s a contrast, is all.”

  “Didn’t you say ‘war’?”

  “After the Hapsburgs put down the Protestant revolt, they made Prague as beautiful as they could,” Jacob said. “Crushingly beautiful.”

  “So beautiful that no one would ever want to leave.”

  “So beautiful that it seemed right that they had won. The way Louis Napoleon remade Paris.”

  “Like capitalism,” Carl suggested. “‘We’ll give you so much pleasure, you’ll never want to try another socioeconomic system.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “‘They came for the freedom, they stayed for the McNuggets.’”

  “That’s terrible,” Jacob said, with delight.

  “That’s not mine. A friend came up with it while we were watching the Berlin Wall on TV.”

  * * *

  “He doesn’t think I was too much the frosty bitch on the ride home,” Melinda suggested.

  “God no,” Jacob reassured her. “Why would he think that?”

  “I was afraid in retrospect that I was too proper. Too English. I can’t quite get used to him. He isn’t like you, is he. You were right about that and I was wrong.”

  “I don’t remember that we said that much about it.”

  “But we thought it, anyway, or at least I did. He isn’t like you, and I can’t decide whether to like him anyway.”

  “Such flattery.”

  “We’re taught that Americans don’t mind personal comments. You won’t mention any of this, will you. I forget that you’re flatmates. You won’t gossip about me.”

  “The beautiful and mysterious Melinda Stone.”

  “Gor, is that all you can come up with? ‘Mysterious’?”

  He couldn’t tell if she might really be offended underneath the pretending to be. They were standing at the edge of a booth, whose benches were crammed with the rest of the group, in the basement of , a wine bar just south of . The ceiling was low, and large blond-wood casks elbowed into the room from along the walls. Loud reflections of chatter hid their words.

  “At first one thinks he is as enthusiastic as he seems,” Melinda went on, returning to the subject of Carl, “and then one becomes aware of his irony, and you worry he’s making fun of you for thinking he could be so eager, and then you realize, no, he really is that enthusiastic, and for some reason he feels obliged to make fun of himself for it. Or to make fun of his need to make fun of himself. But perhaps this is too much analysis.”

  Carl was sitting only a couple of yards away, across from Thom and Jana. It felt very pleasant and sly to be talking about him so near but without his knowledge.

  “You’ve given it some thought.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t call it thought. But what else is one to do with one’s evenings in this town?” She and Rafe were always making an effort to figure out the members of the group and how they fit together. It was part of the way they presided, to the extent that anyone in the group did preside over any of the others. They tried to understand people; they tried to place them.

  “What worries me is—,” Jacob began.

  “Yes?”

  “I shouldn’t say.”

  “Darling, you must, once you’ve begun so promisingly.”

  “What if it’s something less than enthusiasm. Or if that’s all it is, enthusiasm.”

  “I don’t follow, but keep on and perhaps I’ll catch you up.”

  “What if he’s sort of a rogue?”

  “Did you say a rogue?”

  “What if he’s just here to drink beer and get laid. If it’s sort of animal on his part.”

  “Oh, I would look forward to that. And you wouldn’t?”r />
  “I don’t know.” He felt lightheaded; he should have kept his mouth shut.

  Annie rose from her perch at the edge of a bench, and when she was at eye level, Melinda told her, “Jacob is afraid that his friend Carl is a rogue. Do you think there’s any hope of that?”

  “A rogue?”

  “That he’s here for the drink and the loose women,” Melinda clarified.

  “You’re quite mad, Jacob. He’s quite a solid person, I find, and he has very pleasant manners. Before meeting the two of you, I had no idea Americans could pay attention in such a way to other people.”

  “You thought we were hicks.”

  “Not given to listening, rather.”

  “I’m very taken with the eighteenth-century cast of the anxiety,” Melinda said. “With the Samuel-Richardson-novel aspect of it.”

  “I wonder if it isn’t almost treacherous to suggest such a thing of a friend his first night here?” Annie considered.

  “I rather like that about Jacob,” Melinda replied. “His ruthlessness. He does it so sweetly. He has ideas that he wants us to live up to.”

  “I don’t have ideas.”

  “You’re a romantic. You have a whole city of ideas. A republic of ideas. Like any Don Juan.” Carl had told them about the search for the opera house.

  “I’m not a Don Juan.”

  “If the women don’t correspond to the ideas, there are always more women. Or men.”

  “But I’m not a Don Juan.”

  “You’re the only one of us who’s getting any.”

  “Really?” Jacob pointedly queried.

  “On the open market, I mean. Rafe doesn’t count.”

  “I’m not any more.”

  “What became of the parade of Czech youth?”

  “There was only ever one Czech youth, and he was older than me. And it’s over now, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” Melinda said. “Poor love.”

  They waited a moment for the topic to dissipate.

  Melinda reverted to the subject of Carl: “It is only natural in us to wish for him to have adventures, but it would be wrong in us to expect them of him. We must allow him to be himself.”

  “Of course I like him,” Jacob said. “I brought him here, for god’s sake.”

  “I find I’m quite fond of him already,” Annie volunteered.

  “That’s settled, then,” Melinda concluded, because while they had been speaking, Carl himself had stood up on the bench where he had been sitting, in order to extricate himself, and was now holding onto Jacob’s shoulders for steadiness as he hopped to the floor.

  “What is?” Carl asked.

  “That we shall allow you to blossom untrellised,” Melinda supplied.

  He looked into her eyes. “Why thank you, I think.”

  “I forgot to ask how your Christmas was,” Jacob said to Melinda.

  “Rafe did splendidly. Me mum now likes him much more than she does me. This despite his dashing off to meetings every afternoon and not even pretending to pretend that his absences had anything to do with shopping for our gifts.”

  “Rafe is your boyfriend,” Carl said, as if he were confirming the identity of a landmark.

  “Yes,” Melinda answered, and then seemed for a moment to lose the thread of her story.

  “Rafe’s coming later,” Jacob said. “Did he really have to work while you were in London?”

  “He didn’t have to, of course. But since we were there, and since people who could answer some of his questions were there,…” She trailed off again.

  “What questions?” Jacob persisted in asking.

  “Oh darling, I have no idea. Something to do with tanks, I fancy. Or rockets. I only know as much as he murmurs in his sleep. If he’s asked about it directly, he bores on for hours, so I don’t ask as a rule.”

  “Is he a spy?” Carl asked.

  “’E’s a bit of a ’andful, this one, in’t he?” Melinda said to Jacob, with a shrug toward Carl.

  “Did I just make an ass of myself?” Carl asked.

  “Not at all,” she assured him, in her own voice again.

  “Tell me later,” Carl said to Jacob. “I mean, tell me if I made an ass of myself.”

  “Officially Rafe is no more than a translator,” Melinda offered, “but, being Rafe, he has taken it upon himself to become indispensable to the ministry as a researcher.”

  “The ministry?”

  “The Ministry of Defense.”

  “I hope I get to meet him,” Carl said, diplomatically.

  “You will, shortly. He’s very eager to crawl up Stalin’s underbelly, or wherever it is that Henry proposes to take us.”

  “If I was out of line—,” Carl began.

  “Oh, there are no secrets here, you’ll find. Not with this lot.” Her eyes were guarded as she smiled at him, and Jacob sensed that she was afraid, as before, that she had been too strict.

  “We’re very free with one another indeed, you’ll find,” Annie said, with a certain pride. “Very much in one another’s business.”

  * * *

  When Rafe arrived, they settled their bill, and Henry offered to lead the way to Stalin’s monument. Snow had fallen while they had been drinking, but it was only a dusting, and the men’s boots and the heels of the women’s shoes struck the paving stones sharply through it as they walked. At the monument, they climbed several flights of stairs, lit by glare that escaped from street lamps along the embankment below. Near the top, at a utility door on the western end of a landing, they bought tickets and were admitted. Inside, they stepped onto a small rectangle of linoleum, beside a closet whose door had been left ajar for the sake of the light from the bulb inside. The linoleum measured out as much of the pedestal’s interior as anyone had used until that evening. It was like a stage representation of a room, with two walls cut away, in the corner of a much larger stage that remained unlit. Beyond was loose, uneven dirt; the smell of it thickened the air. Jacob had started to unbutton his coat upon entering, and he rebuttoned it at once, because it was as cold inside as it had been outside, and seemed colder. He could not see the ceiling. In the distance, in the rear of the cavernous space, were the lights and murmur of the party. “Should we?” Jacob asked, once the group had assembled. Henry agreed brusquely, as if impatient even with the possibility that they might lose courage, and stepped out onto the dark earth, which gave back none of the little light that fell on it, except in occasional shining patches, which they began to notice as they made their way and which they tried to point out to one another, where a leak, a spill, or an underground spring had turned the dirt to mud.

  Annie took Jacob’s arm. “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “This would be Henry’s idea of a night out. I don’t suppose there’s a loo.”

  “There is not a loo,” said Jana, in the careful English she had begun to speak. She and Thom were just beside them in the dark. “I ask already.”

  “It’s boggy here,” Henry called out, from ahead.

  “Perhaps we’ve found the loo then,” said Thom.

  “Must you?” said Annie.

  “It’s none of my doing. Not yet, mind you.”

  The light at the entrance fell away behind them, while that of the festivities remained at least as far ahead. In the darkness between, it took all their concentration to keep from stumbling, and they fell silent. One had to put down a foot tentatively, feel the slope of the soil beneath, and test the footing before trusting it with one’s full weight. Because the soft earth muffled footfalls, the only near sounds were one’s own breathing and that of one’s friends and the rustle of their coats. Each of them was alone and yet they were together, Jacob felt, and if the dark had not been so frightening he might have wanted the feeling to last longer.

  The lights, which the small crowd nearly obscured, were powered by black cables that ran all the way back to the door they had come in by. Henry and Thom vanished into the crowd to scout for be
er.

  “Who are they, darling, can you tell?” Melinda asked Rafe.

  “Students and artists, it looks like,” he answered. “Czechs; no Westerners.”

  “Are we conspicuous?” Jacob asked.

  “I like to think I’m always conspicuous,” Rafe said. Standing as they were in shadow, it was hard to know how to understand the note of cheeriness in Rafe’s voice. There was a suggestion of effort in it, as if he were trying to set a tone. What light there was caught only in his loose hair, and his face remained dark. “Do you need a job?” he asked Carl abruptly.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “It’s very generous of you—”

  “I haven’t offered yet.”

  Carl chuckled politely. “I may look around, but I’m only planning to stay a few months.”

  “That’s clever of you. I don’t know why none of us thought of that.”

  “Never say never, I suppose,” Carl answered, trying to match Rafe’s casual manner, but not quite managing to. The darkness and the sense of being sequestered underground seemed to have brought the group into an unintended intimacy. They felt themselves being studied by one another, even though it was impossible to see where a person’s eyes were looking.

  “There’s plenty for everyone,” Thom declared, as he and Henry returned with a round, in bottles.

  “Would you like more work?” Rafe asked Jacob privately, after they had all toasted one another. It was another private English class, he explained, in this case a group of college students who edited a political weekly. They had been the first to print a certain rumor during the revolution. “It wasn’t true, of course, but it was very bold of them all the same.”

  “Why did they print it if it wasn’t true?”

  “They thought it was. Somebody was spreading disinformation. Somebody inside the StB, apparently. Nobody can quite figure out the motive.”

  “And these students spread it further.”

  “Quite innocently,” Rafe smiled. “The boys, we call them. Melinda has taught them, too, but neither of us has the time, anymore.”

  “Thank you.” If it paid as well as the chemists’, Jacob would be able to drop down to half-time at the language school.