Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  Jacob showed up with Carl on Henry’s doorstep, his Olivetti and a backpack full of clothes already in tow. Henry welcomed him despite not having invited him, as Jacob had known he would. There was only one sofa in Henry’s living room, Henry apologized, but there was room for a second sleeping bag on the floor. Jacob promised to move into the cafá on Na , for the private English lessons that he was giving to her and her friend. In her absence he was hailed, as he left the Stehlíks’ villa, by her mother, who was hanging wet laundry on the white rubberized cords strung across the family’s small yard.

  “Kubo,” Mrs. Stehlíková said, placing a damp shirt over one shoulder so that her hands were free to mime the meaning of her words, “já mám velké srdce.” With her index fingers she traced in the air before her the symmetrical outline of the large heart that she was explaining that she had, then patted her bosom. She nodded. “Rozumíš?” Do you understand?

  —Thank you, Jacob said. —Until the next sighting.

  As a temporary home for Václav, Henry lent Jacob a steel tureen with a lid, though he warned that he would have to borrow it back if they should decide to boil spaghetti. Improvisation seemed to be the theme of Henry’s housekeeping. On their first night, Carl and Jacob had to shift piles of laundry and stacks of paperbacks in order to make room for their sleeping bags, and there was no sense that any item in the kitchen belonged in one place rather than another—flour, bowls, sardine tins, tea, frying pans, drinking glasses, salt, potatoes, and Marmite mixed in perfect democracy on the shelves and countertops. Jacob fell nonetheless a little bit in love with being Henry’s guest. Henry had assembled more than a dozen different spices, whose Czech names Jacob had not seen often enough to learn, and Jacob went through them, uncapping and sniffing to educate himself. Henry also made Jacob welcome to his washing machine, and since Jacob didn’t know when he might next find one, he washed everything he owned, strewing the apartment with wet clothes, laying socks across sills, draping pants over chair backs, and hooking shirts over doorknobs and window levers. Before falling asleep at night, he read at random from Henry’s paperbacks. Maumauing the Flak-Catchers. The Road to Wigan Pier. In the shower one morning, he even tried Henry’s shampoo, surreptitiously.

  With Henry personally, Jacob was a little stiff, though Henry, for his part, seemed at ease. He may even have welcomed the distraction that Jacob’s presence made. He had, after all, been expecting the company of Carl, but Carl didn’t show up until Sunday night. Upon overhearing Melinda’s news, a Czech woman who taught at the language school had lent her the key to her Prague apartment, which she didn’t need because she was headed to a friend’s chata in the country for the weekend. Not knowing she had gone home with Carl, not seeing her Friday morning or afternoon, Rafe had developed the hope that she suffered as much from the separation as he did and had convinced himself that he might be able to persuade her to accept a year or two in Kazakhstan if he promised to look for a desk in Berlin or Paris afterward. When she disillusioned him, he turned stoic, uncharacteristically businesslike, or so Melinda later described him to Carl. He wished her the best; he didn’t want to hear any details. She began to cry and apologized for crying, saying she knew it was unfair for her to be the one to cry. Rafe agreed that it was unfair, but “for old times’ sake,” he said, he was willing to tell her that he thought she would be all right. Then he asked her to leave.

  On Monday, Melinda moved to the apartment of another colleague, who was willing to let Melinda sleep on her sofa. Melinda was resisting Annie’s attempts to install her at the . She was spending as much time with Carl as she could manage to. After the weekend, the two passed their hours together in cafés and museums, since they had no other privacy, but it was what they were used to. Annie reported this news while signing Jacob up at the , on Tuesday after work. The was clean, bright, Brutalist, and very far from anything else, Jacob discovered—it was at the southern end of the longest subway line. He left without a key because one did not carry a key out of the building but rather traded it at the front desk for a card in a cellophane sleeve with one’s name and room number and an official stamp. On the tedious subway ride back to Henry’s, Jacob stared at his name, handwritten on the card in blue ink. He would stay at the if he had to, he promised himself; he wouldn’t impose on Henry past Friday, the day of Carl’s departure. But he didn’t think it would come to that. He had been asking his students to let him know if they heard of any apartments.

  The hunt for a place to stay kept him so busy that it was only when Henry suggested that they throw a good-bye party for Carl that Jacob became aware of a dull ache in his side and wondered how long he had been pretending to himself that he didn’t feel it. When Henry made the suggestion, Jacob had just come from seeing an apartment in Žižkov, behind the National Museum. It was in a large 1930s building, and the nominal tenant was a mother who had moved in with her unmarried son in another part of town. Her relocation had been kept a secret from the authorities, who might feel obliged to redistribute the property if they knew. It wasn’t certain that under the new dispensation the authorities were still enforcing such redistributions, but as a matter of prudence, the son asked Jacob to say that he was a cousin from America, if any neighbors inquired, and it would be better if Jacob didn’t talk to the neighbors at all, if he could manage to dodge them. The rooms themselves were worn-in and comfortable, with curtains of thin polyester lace on the windows, likable bad paintings of rural landscapes on the walls, and discordant patterns and clashing colors on the wallpaper, duvet cover, and carpet. As at the Stehlíks’, there was a second bedroom crammed full of heirlooms and unused furniture, for which the son, who was showing the apartment, apologized with some embarrassment. Jacob was to have the use of a less cluttered bedroom, one of whose three chests of drawers would be emptied for him. There was also a bathroom and a kitchen. One window gave onto slopes of red clay roof tiles; another overlooked a private garden four stories below. The language school was late with Jacob’s monthly pay, a recurring problem recently, but Jacob told the man that as soon as his salary arrived—as soon as Friday, he hoped—he would pay the rent and move in.

  Prague was changing. There were rumors that the government was going to tighten the rules about foreign workers, which had been largely suspended in the first euphoria of revolution. Long-stay visas, it was said, would no longer be automatically renewed, and after a certain date it would no longer be legal for foreigners to work without a special visa. It was no longer going to be the Wild East. The teaching of English was falling more and more into the hands of business, which paid better but demanded more of a teacher’s time. To go over to the private companies was to lose much of one’s leisure and some of one’s sense of exemption from the marketplace and the obligation to be ranked by it.

  None of Jacob’s friends had lost these things yet. When Carl relayed Melinda’s wish to meet Jacob on the afternoon of Carl’s good-bye party—the afternoon of Carl’s last full day in Prague—Jacob recognized in the invitation the sort of grand gesture that their freedom still made possible. “You don’t mind? It’s your last day.”

  “She has something she wants to tell you,” Carl said, mysteriously.

  They met at the entrance of the Convent of Saint Agnes, in the elbow of a bent street in the north end of Josefov. “You’d never have come here otherwise,” she said. “To see a girl and what’s more a saint.”

  “I like girls.”

  “My eye.”

  A sandy yellow wall topped with red clay tiles hid the compound. The friends stepped through a door of metal bars, decorated with thorns, into a narrow alley. Windowless buildings hedged them in, and it wasn’t until they had zigzagged through several pale rooms, climbed a staircase, and come out into a long corridor with vaulted ceilings that Jacob had a sense of where they were.

  They were standing in the nuns’ cloister. Along one wall, trios of windows shone sunlight into the room. Through the windows, Jacob saw a courtyard.

  �
��Shall we sit outside for a moment?” Melinda asked.

  She led him into the courtyard, where a walkway of loose white stones framed a green lawn. In one corner was the ruin of a well. In another, there stood a cherry tree. The tips of its dark branches were red with buds. Two folding chairs were angled so as to imply conversation, and Jacob and Melinda took possession of them.

  “They’ve dumped the Czech nineteenth-century daubs in the chapter hall yonder, where the nuns used to sleep, but it’s the cloister here I wanted you to see, not the art.” The sun fell angrily on her white skin, which the long winter had kept from it. “It’s that kind of nineteenth-century art that every nation is so proud of having produced, but you have to be in a nostalgic mood and it has to be your nation before you can enjoy it.” She sat on her hands for a moment and straightened her back, in a schoolgirl’s stretch. “What’s rare is this,” she said, with no indicating gesture, trusting the environment to impress itself. She crossed her legs and sat up in her chair. “Thirteenth century. I imagine ladies in wimples holding hands as they walk the length of the cloister. As an aid to meditation. But I suppose that’s wrong somehow. One’s imaginings of history always are.”

  There was something diagonal about the way she was sitting in her chair, not an effect of doubt but an implication of motion—the conflict of a wish in her to walk the cloister herself and a wish just as strong to remain seated and continue talking to Jacob. High in her cheeks a flush had risen to the sun’s challenge.

  “The war between the simple and the pretty,” said Jacob.

  “Poor Carl has had to hear my lectures twice,” she was reminded. “First from you, and then all over again from me, who gave them to you in the first place and can’t help giving them even to you yet again.”

  “I bet he doesn’t mind.”

  “He’s diplomatic.” The grass at their feet fluttered, like a boy’s hair being smoothed. “What I wanted to tell you,” she continued, “what I brought you here to tell you, is that I’m going away with him. Or rather, he’s coming away with me.” She glanced at Jacob and then for politeness’s sake studied the cherry tree.

  “When?” Jacob asked.

  “Tomorrow,” she answered. “I know,” she acknowledged.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I told my mother a few days ago that I was leaving Rafe, and it transpires that she has a friend with an apartment in Rome. It’s at our disposal for a month or so. It’s terrible. We aren’t being punished at all, and the car even makes it easy. That’s as far as we’ve planned. We’ll see at the end of a month whether we can still stand each other.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome.”

  “You should! I’m recommending wild imprudence to everyone now. There’s something in it, I find.”

  “What will you do for money?”

  “What is it Mr. Micawber says?”

  “What if—”

  “It’s a risk, darling,” she interrupted him. She waited for a moment, while he gave up on trying to think of a way to make it safer for them. She continued: “The director of the school has told me I can never come back—that they’ll never even let such as me into the country again, if Klaus is given his head. But perhaps Klaus won’t be given his head. It seems a trifle excessive, eternal banishment simply for having given one’s démission to a language school two months early.”

  “Breaking a contract, I guess.”

  “Oh, don’t say it,” she requested. “Not you, too.”

  “It’s only that they’d never have expected it of you. They’ll survive.”

  “You don’t feel that I’m abandoning you, do you? Though I suppose I am. You must write me. Send me the news from one who remains in the Czechoslovak Eden, once the gate has clanged shut behind me forever.”

  A wind tossed the limbs of the cherry tree and chilled them, but the sun wasn’t going to let them get too cold. There was a luxury in coming to a museum and not seeing any of the art. In the middle ages they might have been a noble brother and sister whose family had given a herd of sheep and who had come to find out what the nuns had made of the gift.

  “So Kaspar was wrong,” he hazarded.

  “Oh, maybe it’s to spite him,” she thought aloud.

  “Maybe what is?”

  She considered before answering. “It’s mortifying to say, and you’ll say it isn’t any of your business,” she began. “Still, nothing has happened.”

  He thought he understood.

  “I don’t mean absolutely nothing. You know what I mean.”

  “I think so,” he answered carefully.

  “And what’s more, I’m not in love with him,” she announced. “It’s too soon.”

  He hesitated. “Are you just friends?”

  “Oh god no.” She seemed to feel sorry that she had confused him. “I’ve made a muddle of explaining.”

  “It doesn’t have to be clear to me.”

  “The not having to say is what I’ve fallen for.”

  “You have fallen.”

  “But I don’t have to say. It’s sort of a holiday.”

  “I think I see.” By the time this cherry tree flowered, he would have lost both of them, and by the time the flowers fell, they would probably have lost each other. “You’re a pair of rogues,” he said, to make light of it.

  They sat together a while longer, imagining a tour of the scriptorium, in the course of which they would compliment the nuns’ progress on a book of hours, commissioned long ago and years overdue.

  * * *

  The first to arrive at the farewell party was Annie. When the buzzer rang, Jacob set down a glass and the towel with which he had been drying it and ran to the window. “Here,” he said, leaning out and dangling Henry’s keys. “Catch.”

  “I won’t do,” she said from below. “You may drop them if you like, but I shan’t ‘catch,’ thank you very much.”

  He lobbed them toward her anyway. She stepped back, and he heard them ping off the concrete and scuffle as they were knocked into the dusty planting beside the walkway. She was wearing her oversize, boxy glasses because spring had made her contact lenses impossible, and when she crouched to look for the keys she raised the glasses and rested them in her rust-gold hair. She gave no cry when she found the keys because it did not occur to her that Jacob would still be watching her and merely proceeded inside without a word.

  Henry met her at the door in his apron and kissed her on both cheeks in greeting.

  “You look quite dashing,” she told him.

  “Just doing a spot of washing up.”

  “Is all this yours, then?”

  “Have you not seen it before?”

  “No one ever invites me anywhere. Ehm, listen, Henry, I brought a few of me things, and I thought perhaps I might stay a few days, if it’s no trouble.”

  “There may still be a corner left in the next room, if you hurry.”

  “That’ll be grand,” she thanked him. “And I’ll be bringing half a dozen friends with me from the as well.”

  “The more the merrier.”

  While Henry washed and Jacob dried, she gave herself a tour.

  “And you prefer this squalor to the ,” she resumed, upon returning.

  “Say,” Henry objected.

  “But it is squalor.”

  “I found a place, actually,” Jacob volunteered.

  “Did you?”

  “In Žižkov. The landlord doesn’t live in the building this time.”

  She drifted away into the living room, perhaps looking for somewhere to set down her little canvas backpack. “Are you going to leave your laundry all about like this, during the party?” came her voice. “I don’t mind, for myself.”

  “I hadn’t given it any thought,” said Henry.

  “Quite intimate, isn’t it,” she said when they joined her to make an appraisal. “There isn’t a closet, perhaps, where it could be stashed.”

  “Hang on,” said Henry, checking one. “No.” The
closet was filled by Jacob’s and Carl’s luggage.

  “Perhaps the shower. Have you taken your showers, the two of you?” Carl had left for a Vietnamese dinner with Melinda several hours before.

  “If we take this rubbish down the tip,” suggested Henry, pulling a crate out from beneath the sink, “perhaps we could put the old togs in here.”

  “You can’t possibly put your things in there. You do mean to wear them again some day, don’t you?”

  “If Jacob has left us any washing powder.”

  “I heard that it was epic, your laundering,” Annie told Jacob with admiration.

  As a last resort, they piled the laundry onto the far side of Henry’s bed, covered it with a blanket, and topped it with his pillows, with the intention that the ensemble should pass for a sofa, though the lumpy result instead gave the impression of an undisposed-of body, imperfectly disguised.

  There was no time to improve on the arrangement, however. The buzzer was soon rung by three Czech women who taught at the language school, each bearing a white plastic shopping bag held sideways, artfully tented, with the hand clasp snapped-to and folded under. One, who in the course of the year had become friendly with Annie, exchanged kisses with her, but they were Melinda’s friends for the most part, and in her absence they fussed awkwardly over Henry in his capacity as host, wishing to make themselves busy and useful. They pronounced the refrigerator that Henry and Jacob had packed full of bottled beer excellent and daunting. They knew to set an empty ashtray over the full one when they lifted it off of Henry’s coffee table to dump its contents. One slid her shopping bag into the refrigerator atop the bottles that had been laid in parallel across a shelf like rollers in an assembly line, but the other two immediately extracted from their bags plates of , afterward inspecting the bags to confirm that no topping had touched the interiors and folding them in a way that did not compromise the handles.

  “Peas and ham, I dare say,” Annie observed.

  “In mayonnaise,” Jacob added quietly.

  “Do you not fancy mayonnaise then?” Annie asked with dismay.