Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “In Prague, it takes willpower not to see her, and in Krakow it doesn’t. Now I miss her and I miss the struggle to not go see her.”

  “I see, yes.”

  “There’s nothing in the way. Nothing in me in the way.”

  “But if you’re going home,” Annie suggested.

  “Oh, that’s in the way.”

  “I don’t see why,” Jacob objected. He didn’t want them to talk about the problem too solemnly. “According to your own theory, it shouldn’t matter what comes next.”

  Annie frowned. “What theory is this?”

  “This idea that I had,” Carl replied. “That the meaning of a relationship can’t come from anything but the experience of it. That it only exists in the present tense.”

  “Independent of consequences,” Jacob contributed.

  “Mmm.”

  “The problem is that in the present you do think about the future,” Carl said. “You even care about it. For example, I want to try not to ask Melinda to see me again.” His tone suggested that he didn’t necessarily take his pose of sacrifice at face value; he left open the possibility that he thought it was a sophisticated mistake. “Maybe what comes next wouldn’t have mattered two months ago,” he continued. “When I thought I had come to Europe to sow my wild oats or whatever. Before I knew her. Or any of you. Before I got to know Rafe, for god’s sake.”

  “I see,” Jacob said.

  “It would be different if I could say, ‘Come back with me to New York, where I work as an investment banker and live in a loft and can take you to the opera every week.’”

  “That would be so violent,” Jacob said.

  “But I wouldn’t sense that, if I were that person.”

  “You’re a person who’s open to sensing things,” said Jacob.

  “That’s a generous way of putting it. And I’m going back to a room in Somerville and a part-time job as an English teacher.”

  “If you look at it that way, all of us here are nothing.”

  “But not while you’re here, is the thing,” Carl said.

  They sipped their sour coffees. Wind beat on the canvas of the parasol above them, so that the pole and metal table trembled and the cups shivered in their saucers. Jacob wanted to believe that he was staying for some purpose other than mere postponement—for some reason other than a reluctance to face up to what his native country would allow him to be. He accepted that he was losing time. He might never catch up, but maybe the delay itself was somehow a part of who he was going to be.

  “You sort of have to go to Auschwitz without thinking about it ahead of time, don’t you,” Carl said, thinking back to the day before. “Otherwise no one would ever go.”

  “I wanted to know what it was like,” said Annie. “One goes to cemeteries, after all.”

  Sun glare was whitening the flagstones of the plaza. Carl was the first to remark on a crowd that seemed to be forming. “Is something going on?” he asked.

  Young people were gathering in the square in twos and threes, not in any organized way and not in any great density. It would scarcely have been noticeable except that here and there a person was dressed a little oddly.

  “Is that a—?” Jacob began but let his question falter because he couldn’t think of a name for the costume he was looking at. The man he had noticed was wearing too many clothes, a few too many of which were decorative rather than practical—a scarf, a bandanna, a vest, some kind of leggings—but it was hard to say what the ensemble was intended to represent, if anything. Excess? Then Jacob saw a more identifiable outfit: “I think that man there is in drag.”

  With some reluctance Annie too turned in her chair to see.

  “Can we go look?” Jacob asked.

  They asked in German for their bill—their Czech was sometimes mistaken for Russian, and English wasn’t understood—and left the café by stepping over a low rope into the square at large.

  Annie lowered her sunglasses like a visor. Carl raised his rangefinder to his eye and as he walked toyed with the aperture ring to measure the light. Jacob by default led the way, though he felt himself to be more pulled than pulling—drawn into the square by discoveries he began to make there. Three young women in black, for example, had sewn gold stripes onto their blouses and had twisted in their hair wires wound with golden yarn. Bees. A man with a Roman nose, inspired perhaps by his nose, had put on a toga, combed his hair down flat like Caesar’s, and then tied small-denomination zlotys, rendered nearly worthless by currency reform, to a rope that he wore for a belt, to the straps of his sandals, and to a wreath that he wore as a laurel, as if the zlotys were ribbons and he were—not Caesar—Diogenes? The man’s friends came up and added zlotys to him. There were pirates. There was a sheik. Jacob’s companions followed so cautiously and so slowly that Jacob from time to time found himself exposed in his admiration, smiling mutely and alone in front of a costumed Pole who seemed aware that he had put himself on display even to tourists yet by a certain disregard communicated that the display was not for any tourist’s sake. Jacob felt a growing wish to establish between himself and the players before him grounds of commonality. He felt, that is, a general love, or anyway a hunger or a lust. But “Take pictures, take more pictures,” his command to Carl, was all he could think to say as an expression of it. There were more than a few men in drag. One with permed hair, mascara, and freckles—the freckles were natural—glanced shyly down over his falsies when he caught Jacob watching him. Three men in ties and fedoras guarded with plastic guns a white Polish Fiat that they had painted with bullet holes and with the English words MAFIA and PROFESSIONALISTS. Most of the costumes were not so easy to unriddle. It was perhaps this vagueness of conception that left Annie unimpressed. “Rather loud,” she observed, of a group of boys whose aspect suggested no particular idea. Some who were serving their compulsory military service seemed to be wearing merely their uniforms for the occasion. Others had no costumes at all but only a prop, and one such prop, carried by three men, was a large traditional Communist flag, gold hammer and sickle on a red ground, now evidently a sufficient signifier of irony in itself. Simple drunkenness signified as much for many more. It was a day of carnival, they learned from some other tourists, an annual ritual of the university.

  The students began hollering. A man in a peasant’s blouse and a peculiarly shapeless leather hat began to blow a slender antique clarion. No one paid attention to his call, nor did they heed the gestures of a young blond in a black robe and a cardboard miter who with mock solemnity and hauteur began to bless and to direct the crowd. The three bees grabbed hands and began to skip in a line. Other lines soon formed and began to cross through the crowd, zigging and zagging. Soon, too, there were circles, dancing around a piper or just to their own unself-conscious singing.

  It was as if the friends had stumbled into a party that they hadn’t been invited to.

  A young man with deep-sunk eyes, his plaid flannel shirt half-unbuttoned, wildly drunk and in no disguise, began to march, fury and drunkenness cooperating in him to create a stately pace. He bellowed fiercely as he proceeded, punching first one fist into the air and then the other, sometimes both. At first, as with the trumpeter and the bishop, no one seemed to pay attention, but the rhythm of his steps, because slower, was decisive, and the bees began to trail him, shufflingly. Others in turn unseriously fell in with them. Half a dozen revelers climbed into a jeep, which had been parked on the square in anticipation, and starting its engine, they nosed it into the procession, too. On the back of the jeep was mounted a long white banner that looked at first glance like that of the workers’ movement Solidarity, but instead of the word “,” the students had painted in the same iconic, bright red hand-lettering. Yet there was no trace of humor in the eyes of the young man at the head of the parade. His eyes didn’t even focus. He had merely the all-hailing, impersonal belligerence of a drunk who needs to get into a fight. He trained his menace steadily outward, ahead of him, clearing a path.

&nb
sp; He led the procession toward the north entrance of the great market hall. No clear distinction separated the parade from the crowd admiring it. One drew from the other—drew the other into it. So the friends, too, followed the leader of the parade.

  “We’re going inside,” Jacob said as they approached the hall. It delighted him.

  “Should we?” Annie asked.

  As they passed under the arch of the doorway, the chants of the students began to gather and echo in the round vaults of the ceiling and the alcoves along the hall’s long gallery. Having left the sunlight, they were blind for a few moments, and had for sensation only the echoes and the feel of staggering and jostling. As their eyes adjusted, the hall itself appeared: the ceilings painted with the emblems and heraldic crests of the city; gilt chandeliers, whose shape uncannily but not quite identifiably suggested an animal growth of bone or horn; and, obscured by the marchers themselves, the stalls of vendors, whose cheap goods, the usual off-brand Western cosmetics, English-language workbooks printed in China, and flimsy leather belts and purses, had disappointed the friends on a visit two days prior. They were harrowing the temple, Jacob thought. Was the word “harrowing” or “hallowing”? He couldn’t remember. He turned to check on his friends and saw that Annie was slouching defensively.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Brilliant, thanks.”

  The light, as they emerged by the southern doors, washed out the sky, and the roar of the crowd, escaping the hall’s confines, changed pitch, the way the roar in a whelk’s shell rises and clarifies as you turn it away from your ear.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Would you please not ask me that so often?”

  Carl trotted ahead so as to have a shot of the parade as it exited the market hall. Inside there hadn’t been enough light to take pictures, but in the closeness he had caught some of the crowd’s enthusiasm.

  The parade left the great square by a southern street. Jacob and Annie trailed it on the sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Jacob said to Annie, when Carl had abandoned the two of them on one of his documentary missions.

  “Yesterday?”

  The parade had thinned as it stretched along the street, and in slow cycles it shouted to and was hailed by an audience lining the street.

  “I wasn’t ready to see it, but—”

  “Gah, no,” she cut him off. “It isn’t that.”

  “You are angry, then.”

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Don’t encourage him,” she said, after a pause. “Don’t encourage him to break her heart.”

  He heard for a moment the coarseness of the cheering around them. “But if it’s what they both want,” Jacob tried to answer.

  “He doesn’t want it for her.”

  “If he can’t stay, he can’t stay.”

  “That’s no reason.” Briefly she challenged him with her gaze but then looked away.

  The parade turned west, toward the river. It passed one of the seminaries, where a couple of young men with unwashed hair were leaning out of adjacent windows in an upper story to watch. —Come down! a parader shouted, in Polish words that resembled Czech closely enough for Jacob to understand. Others echoed the call, and soon the crowd was roaring: —Come down! Come with us! The two men in the window glanced at each other with guilty happiness. One retreated, but the other waved back to the crowd sheepishly, amicably. Jacob nudged Carl, but when Carl raised his camera, the remaining boy, too, ducked, and there were only the empty windows and a flapping white shade.

  * * *

  “We thought perhaps Thursday night,” Melinda let Jacob know, when he saw her in the teacher’s lounge upon their return. “In a place with the absurd name of the Love Bar, which Rafe reports is quite sympatický. Just south of the Charles Bridge, on the embankment itself. On the water, really.”

  “Which side?”

  “This side. Our side.”

  Jacob liked being back even more than he had liked being away. He liked living in a world where the occasion didn’t have to be named. He liked the sense of order according to which it fell to Mel and Rafe to make such appointments.

  This world and this order Carl was due to leave in a week and a half, a few days after the new month. Henry was going to host him for those last few days, so Carl wouldn’t have to spend a whole month’s rent on them. had confirmed that her family was willing to take back Carl’s room on the first. So Carl never quite unpacked when they got back from Krakow. He lived out of his suitcase.

  Was it just because of the rent? In American terms, it was a negligible sum. Was Carl, though he had come to Prague as Jacob’s friend, leaving as Henry’s? Maybe there had been moments when Jacob, despite his caution, had come too close. Carl was so gentle he would never have let Jacob become aware of such moments, if there had been any. The doubt was in his mind the morning he found Carl cropping off handfuls of his beard in the bathroom. “Getting ready for America?” Jacob asked.

  “I hadn’t thought of America,” Carl confessed. “Sure, for America.”

  Jacob didn’t try to go behind Carl’s irony. Later, shaved and dressed, Carl said, as he rubbed his chin during breakfast, “It’s weird. It’s like that game Dead Man’s Hand. The nerves feel wrong. Did you ever play that?”

  His cheeks were pale from having been hidden from the sun. There was something in the alteration that collapsed the past three and a half months. The revealed face was vulnerable, unfamiliar, and handsome, and it added to the friends’ unease with each other, as did their speculations about the Stehlíks’ plans for Carl’s room after he was gone. Between that room and Honza’s quarters lay another room still uncleared of junk, so there was a chance that nothing would be done with Carl’s room right away.

  For the interval, what sense of home the friends had was to be found only in the arrangements of their wider circle—in the welcome that they knew they could look forward to from the others and in the intuitive way it was planned. On Thursday night, as they walked toward their appointment along the crooked familiar path through the Old Town, cutting through the alleys and pasáže that they now knew by instinct, past the church with broken windows, past the music store that never opened, they felt as if they were returning to something, a tradition of some kind that they had long ago been admitted to, something whose form was like a seminar or a court, where a role was defined by growing into it. A few hours before, Carl, after asking Jacob to teach him the words for “short” and “shorter,” had gone and had his hair cut, and the effect of it had resolved the novelty of his beardlessness. He was suddenly again the old image of Carl that Jacob found that his mind’s eye had never in fact surrendered. He was who Jacob had always known he was. Everything was going to be all right, Jacob felt, even if Carl really did leave, as it seemed he was going to.

  They came out to the river at the Charles Bridge and turned left, passing under an arch and then along a hoarding, both of which blocked their view. Unable to see, they were briefly seized by the characteristic Prague anxiety of never finding the entrance—of arriving at one’s goal but remaining blocked from it by a wall of stone on account of having overlooked an alley or a medieval door a few dozen yards back, which had served as the approach so immemorially that no one any longer marked or described it. They doubled back to the Charles Bridge in premature retreat; then, giving up on this retreat, proceeded once more under the arch and along the hoarding, until, at the end of the hoarding, their eyes tumbled down steps to the right, into a spit of land that angled into the river. Here they were. They descended, and as they did, left behind the blare of the city at dusk for the placidity of the water, black and quiet, which was wrinkling and smoothing itself below them at the base of the blocks of carved white stone upon which they walked.

  From the end of the spit, at its corner, a weir ran out. Water passed over it so evenly and silently that it was possible to imagine walking the stone barrier all the way across the river.
/>   “In here, I think.” Carl had found the door.

  The first room was shallow, crowded, and harshly lit. It was dominated by a bar with a glass top and brass trim. In a corner, in an entente that shut out the loud and busy drinkers around them, stood Melinda, Rafe, and Henry.

  It was the fluster in the room, probably, that prevented Henry and the couple from responding as warmly as Carl and Jacob had expected them to. Their greetings were so quiet that Rafe at last broke out, “The boys don’t get kisses? Shall I kiss them?”

  “If you like,” Melinda licensed him.

  “I don’t like,” he told her, and then continued, addressing the new arrivals, “but you don’t mind, do you? If you can do without hers…”

  “Don’t,” she cautioned him.

  “I don’t, I don’t,” he answered. “I never do.”

  “How was Poland?” Henry asked.

  “That’s right,” Rafe joined him. “Your expedition.”

  Carl abruptly excused himself to get beers for himself and Jacob. Melinda followed him to the bar with her gaze.

  “It was good,” Jacob answered. He wanted to delay answering in detail until his fellow travelers were at his side, so he tried to deflect the question. “I heard you might go farther east yourself.”

  “Poland isn’t very ‘east,’” Rafe pointed out.

  “It’s sort of farther ‘west,’ isn’t it,” Jacob admitted.

  “I understood it to lie to the north,” Rafe said, to finish off the joke. Then, neutrally, “No, we don’t have to worry about Poland any more.”

  “So are you going east?” Jacob repeated his inquiry.

  “It depends.”

  “What does it depend on?”

  Rafe leaned into his girlfriend, and when she startled, he pretended to have done so by accident. “On her,” he said, with a nod of his head.

  “No,” Melinda simply said.

  “In a way,” said Rafe.

  “Oh, that way,” Melinda agreed.

  “What way is that?” Jacob asked.