Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  * * *

  When Jacob had first fallen in love with a boy, three years before, he had seen that it was possible simply to turn away. The boy was straight; he was never going to fall in love with Jacob; and moreover Jacob then hoped that he himself would turn out not to be gay. It would have been correct to withdraw in silence, and it would have been prudent. But in giving up the misery he would also have had to give up the joy he found in his friend’s company, and so he stayed and eventually came to understand and name for himself the joy as well as the misery, though the boy never understood, never heard him name them, and perhaps never even knew the half of it. Ever since, it had been a principle with Jacob not to side with righteousness against feeling. Righteousness was a trap, he felt, and he had been lucky to get out as quick as he had. He therefore now set about being broad-minded about Carl’s crush. The happiness of their circle didn’t seem much threatened; as Jacob’s own experience suggested, nothing comes of most wishes. Furthermore, in Rafe’s absence, Carl and Melinda were careful with each other the next time they met. They weren’t distant, as they might have been if they were frightened. There was nothing for anyone to notice, and no one did.

  The group, meanwhile, accepted Carl completely. When he announced that he had found another hospitable pub near Wenceslas Square, the group trusted him and for variety’s sake took his suggestion. In two cavelike rooms, whose low arched ceilings had been yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke, he led them to flimsy tables crammed together so tightly that you couldn’t get into or out of your seat without the cooperation of the people at the next table. Whenever you rose and made your way down the aisle to the men’s room, chair legs caught at you like brambles and had to be shaken off. The beer on tap was Pilsner Urquell; Carl recommended the goulash; the waiters were businesslike and did not try to pass off a tourist menu instead of the regular one. For a week the friends returned almost nightly, until their coats stank of the place and even by day their eyes were red from its haze.

  At that point they decided to go back to the jazz club in . They all wanted to show it to Carl, especially Annie, who had first discovered it. Jacob steeled himself, but when they went, no one there reminded him of his misadventure. Probably none of the staff even remembered it. Carl crowed over the jazz club, to Annie’s gratification. Not only the lofty rooms and loud, careless audience delighted him but also the music, which he alone among the group was connoisseur enough to appreciate. “They’ve got a New Orleans sound,” he tried to explain to Jacob. “A bigger sound. Do you know anything about jazz?”

  “Nothing,” Jacob confessed, shamelessly.

  After three or four rounds, Annie would ask one of the men to dance, and if he refused, Melinda and Jana would in solidarity insult him, so that soon a number of the friends would find themselves together on the dance floor. Annie snapped her fingers soundlessly and stepped lightly in the pattern of a square; Melinda swayed from side to side while swiveling her bent arms; Thom always nodded solemnly. Returning to the table, flushed, the dancers were told how good they had looked by whoever had remained behind, usually Carl or Henry. “You ought to have joined us,” Annie would say in reproach.

  The only weak link in their chain of pleasure was communication. At the pay phone near their local hospoda, Jacob and Carl could make outgoing calls, but they were rarely able to receive an incoming one. Mr. Stehlík, who would have hung up on their friends, was in Poland with his wife for more than a month, but once their friends began calling regularly, thanks to Carl’s more gregarious nature, decided that it was unthrifty to leave the phone off the hook for the time it took to walk downstairs and find out if they were home. For a while she hollered to them from the top of the stairs, but they never heard her, so she gave that up. Instead she took messages, which were almost always incomplete, because she was too polite to tell callers when she hadn’t understood. “But where?” Jacob would ask, his patience thinning, and would translate his question into Czech for herself—“Ale kde?”—and then shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. He said something—‘elephant’? Nevím, nevím. To jsem asi .”

  “Elephant?” Jacob would desperately echo, miming a trunk.

  “Asi ne,” she would skeptically reply. Maybe not, after all.

  The problem preoccupied Jacob. Two lodgers had a stronger claim than one on the Stehlíks’ phone. It seemed almost unjust. If only there were a way for to signal to them and spare herself the stairs. All the windows in the house were doubled, and in the outer frame of the one in Carl’s bedroom, Jacob had noticed a small hole in the lower left corner, which had once admitted a wire of some kind. On the top floor of the Rott hardware store in Malé , downtown, he bought string and a small brass bell. If the bell were set on the edge of the table near Carl’s bed, and Carl’s inner window were left ajar, and a string were threaded from the bell through the hole in Carl’s outer window up the outside of the house to the Stehlíks’ living room directly above, where the end of the string could be held until needed by closing it in their outer window, then would be able to ring for them by opening her window and giving a tug.

  —But when Father returns? asked.

  —But we aren’t doing anything! Jacob pleaded. —The hole already exists. A tiny little hole!

  She acceded. Very imperfectly it worked, though now and then Jacob and Carl failed to hear the bell, which clanked just once each time it was tumbled onto the carpet.

  * * *

  In Jacob’s favorite class at the language school his worst student was a woman in her thirties named Milena. Her hair, prematurely white, was braided and pinned in a bun, in what looked like a folk style. She had an apologetic manner; whenever she spoke, a smile so narrowed her eyes, which were already hidden behind thick glasses, that Jacob couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him. She reminded him of a bashful professor he had studied with, who had closed his eyes whenever he raised them from his lectern. She never handed in homework assignments. She took copious notes during class but seemed to remember nothing from one week to the next. If he singled her out, to make sure she had understood a point of grammar, she became flustered and indicated by pantomime that he should address someone else. After every class, in what amounted almost to a ritual, two or three students approached his desk to ask (“if you will allow”) about his life in America or his accommodations in Prague. Milena was never among them.

  In this she was like his best student, a Vietnamese guest worker named Phuoc, who asked to be called Philip. He knew English better than Czech, as he declared during the class’s first meeting, because he had taught himself English from books as a child in Vietnam. Though his pronunciation was sometimes impenetrable, his vocabulary was immense, and Jacob quickly learned that when he failed to understand Philip, it was sometimes because Philip was using a word that Jacob didn’t know. Among other things, Philip had read Shakespeare, which complicated matters. During the scheduled periods of free conversation, Philip often spoke of his fondness for English and of the difference between his life in Prague and the more austere one he had lived in Vietnam, where his wife remained. But he never approached Jacob after class to say more. Jacob had the impression that Philip refrained because he didn’t want to seem to step out of his place as a guest in the Czechs’ world. Philip never spoke to his fellow students, or they to him, except when the language exercises required it.

  Though Philip never overcame his reticence, one day Milena did. —May I in Czech? she asked.

  —Can’t you in English? Jacob irritably replied, but then it occurred to him that she might have been about to tell him she was giving up.

  “I try,” she agreed. She clasped her hands under her chin as if gathering her thoughts there, and then her head sank over her hands with the effort of concentration. “I have two children,” she said with laborious slowness. “For them I learn English. I try to teach but”—here she appealed to Jacob with open palms and a laugh at herself—“I cannot.” She broke into Czech: —I wanted to ask therefore,
if it is possible to arrange private hours? I would pay, of course, whatever you charge.

  Now that he knew the mystery of her persistence, Jacob felt ashamed of his impatience. —Lessons for you? he asked, to make sure.

  —For my children, rather.

  They were nine and six, she said, a boy and a girl. Jacob objected that he had never taught children, but Milena was confident that he would be able to. He named the hourly rate that he earned from the chemists; she hesitated but said she was willing to pay it.

  —It is distant, our home, she said, uncertainly. He didn’t think he could object; for months she had traveled the same distance to him. So she wrote out the numbers of the three buses he would have to take and the names of the stops where he would have to transfer. Later, when he consulted his map, he saw that he would be riding beyond the edge of it. Later still, when he alighted from the second of the buses, at the foot of a long white panelák, into a wind that threw gravel down an empty cement walkway, he realized that the journey was too long for the fee he had proposed. But now there were children expecting lessons from him; he couldn’t back out.

  There were only two other passengers on the last bus he had to take, which idled for several minutes before getting under way. Against the posted rules, one of the passengers was bantering with the driver. Jacob nervously read the names of passing street signs. As of two minutes ago, he was late. He was afraid he would make himself even later by failing to pull the cord in time for his stop. Sometimes a bus driver would sail past a stop if he hadn’t been alerted far enough in advance.

  Jacob managed to pull the cord in time. He shouted thanks to the driver, and on the sidewalk was struck by the sight of the panelák’s bleached concrete walls, now distant, where a few newly washed sheets, even more brilliantly white, fluttered against the ropes that held them, on balconies that ran the length of the building and brought to mind the decks of an ocean liner. Then he turned away, into a street of villas.

  A rank of bare lindens defended the houses on the right. On the left, a wire-mesh fence gave way to a brick wall, painted yellow. A door in this wall bore the number Milena had given him. He rang the bell and waited, tracing with his eyes the brown serpentine fingers of a vine that had grown up the wall and over it.

  “It is, how to say, wine,” Milena explained when she answered the door.

  “A grapevine,” Jacob corrected.

  “Yes. Please, come in.”

  They walked past a rabbit hutch, from which small red eyes watched them, and past the snow-covered furrows and mounds of a wintering garden. At the corner of the villa, two children soundlessly appeared in a doorway as Milena opened it. —But children, he cannot enter, you must step out of his way, the mother said, in a mild tone that they seemed to consider harmless, for they watched him a few moments longer before sidling back inside. “Please,” Milena resumed, gesturing that he should enter.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” echoed the girl, throwing him a glance.

  “You already speak English,” Jacob answered, and the girl became shy. He stepped after the children into a sort of cloakroom. The pale winter sun, with its touch of violet, came in through the sidelights of the door. A narrow staircase led up into a honey-colored darkness.

  “Prokop, Anežka, Mr. Putnam,” Milena announced.

  “Oh, they can call me Jacob,” he offered. He repeated their names, and they more quietly repeated his.

  Laughing for the sake of politeness, rather than because of any joke, Milena tugged off her shoes and replaced them with slippers from a low shelf. The children were already wearing their slippers. Milena tried to dissuade Jacob from taking off his shoes, but when he insisted, she offered him slippers, too: —Please, though they are not so pretty…

  —Mami, in English! Anežka demanded, in Czech.

  —You are right, you are right, Milena replied, also in Czech. “Please,” she addressed Jacob, “up?” Evidently the family lived on the villa’s second floor.

  “Tchay-kop,” Prokop said, when they reached the top of the stairs.

  “Dj,” Jacob corrected. The sound didn’t exist in Czech.

  “Dj,” the boy accurately repeated. “Moment,” he added, and then he ran off, Anežka following.

  Milena led Jacob into a large room that ran the east length of the building. It seemed to combine dining and living areas. In broad windows, full of the already darkening sky, hung pots of delicate ferns; the windows were underlined by low shelves of books along the wainscoting. Jacob noticed what must have been an encyclopedia—a file of brown spines of a nineteenth-century smokiness, with feathery, gilded lettering. In the room’s far corner, a deal table supported a television with a chalky screen. A slump-shouldered sofa faced it; draped over the sofa was a polyester shawl, auburn and umber. The dining table was dressed in white linen.

  “Please,” said Milena, touching the place at the head of the table. “Something to a meal?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Jacob said. He saw that his words confused her. She had caught the implication of refusal, but not his precise meaning, and she looked hurt. “Did you already make it?” he asked, trying to save the moment. He repeated his question in Czech: — Is it already prepared? The way he phrased it sounded almost demanding.

  —Yes, yes, she assured him.

  “Okay, sure, thank you,” he said, though he had no appetite. It was not yet five in the afternoon.

  —It is already prepared, she repeated, and backed into a white kitchen. He saw that there were several covered saucepans simmering on her stove. The sight made him afraid he had just agreed to eat the family’s dinner, but he could think of no way to find out now whether he had really been meant to accept the generosity.

  Prokop appeared at the threshold of the room, holding something behind his back. His sister crouched beside him, tightly hugging a doll—a baby-girl doll with a plastic head and a lumpy cloth body. Prokop whispered something to his mother, who nodded in response. —But can he in Czech? Prokop then asked her aloud.

  —He can, Milena answered. To Jacob she explained, “Prokop wants you show…”

  The boy held out a green metal toy. At first Jacob thought it was a railroad car. —It’s a tram! Jacob said.

  The boy looked disappointed. —It is an American tram, he insisted.

  —Show, Jacob said. Without surrendering it, the boy let him look. The toy was forest green, with peach and red trim. At each end was an open balcony, with steps for mounting or alighting, and at the corners were poles to grab on to, which seemed to support the roof of the car like a temple’s columns. Along the sides, windows had been cut into the tin, and rectangles of what looked like exposed camera film had been placed in the frames. Through them Jacob could see an occasional glint off a gear of the mechanism inside. The boy turned the toy as he held it out so that Jacob could see all the sides, as if it were a gem and he were displaying its facets.

  —It’s handsome, Jacob said in praise. A placard on the car’s roof read Bay and Taylor Sts. —It’s from San Francisco, he added.

  —From where?

  —It’s a city in Western America, where there are many hills, and so they have trams.

  The boy now looked warily at his own toy, as if it had kept a secret from him.

  —A friend of father brought him it, Milena commented.

  —Shall we start the lesson?

  —But no, you must have something in the way of a meal, Milena replied. —Sit, please.

  The two children sat in a row to his right. —The children just ate, Milena explained, as she set before him a plate of sliced meatloaf, boiled cabbage, and dumplings, covered in gravy. It was gray and smelled like soil after a rain. As he ate, the last of the daylight slipped away.

  Anežka had set her doll, which Jacob had forgotten to ask about, in her lap, and she was making its mittenlike hands paw the air in some private game.

  —And what do you have there? Jacob asked. —Or rather, whom?r />
  The girl smiled but did not reply. The stranger was not supposed to have seen.

  —But Anežka, do not be embarrassed, the mother reproached her.

  —How is she named? Jacob tried again.

  —.

  —And where is she from?

  —From Pardubice.

  —She’s pretty.

  —I thank you, Anežka formally answered.

  —And will she learn English?

  This was too much to reply to. Jacob worried that he might not be able to rise to the challenge. His hands felt clumsy and overlarge, and he felt oafish chewing and swallowing in front of the children. They shifted in their seats with the caution of birds reassessing a branch that the wind has nudged. The boy had brought out his cable car because it was American and Jacob was American, and the idea of a match in origins had furnished some cover, but the girl had innocently stripped the cover away when, in imitation of her brother, she had brought out her doll, which was merely precious to her. The children almost seemed too delicate to teach.

  In the event, of course, as the lesson proceeded, the children’s delicacy was forgotten, like the cable car, which remained on the table but went unregarded. They learned greetings, introductions, and farewells, and thus were able to turn the shock of having met Jacob into a game, reimagining themselves with different names and different ages, and as coming from different parts of the world. The effort of trying to be a symbol to the children and trying not to be one taxed Jacob’s energy, and on the way home, he fell asleep on one bus after another.

  * * *

  As it rose and fell amid the tiles of the former shower, Annie’s voice, though soft, sometimes touched a note that sang because of the geometry of the room. “The end rings false, I find, anyway,” she was saying, of a novel she had just finished. Her books were due at the British library in the Clementinum, and she was planning another trip there. Standing, because there were no chairs in the smoking room, she had folded her arms so that her elbows rested on her stomach, and one forearm was tucked around her, like a girdle, while the other fell loosely forward, extending the hand that held her cigarette. “Emmeline, the one in love, she would have such feelings—but you ought to read it. I shan’t give away the ending.”