Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “Pardon,” Jacob heard. Kaspar was touching his arm. Kaspar was too ill to share a selfish pleasure like dancing.

  “Yes?” Jacob said. He cupped his ear but didn’t stop his feet at first.

  “I am leaving,” Kaspar said. “I am curious, if we shall meet again.”

  Jacob felt obliged to stop dancing. “Sure, we’ll see each other around,” he said. He backed Kaspar up into the cold light of the vestibule, where it was a little quieter.

  Kaspar looked into Jacob’s face shyly but searchingly, as if he thought Jacob were keeping something there hidden from both of them. “But without Melinda…,” Kaspar suggested.

  Tomorrow there would no longer be an apartment in Prague where Kaspar could rely on finding a bath and a plate of sausages and caraway-seed bread if he dropped in uninvited. It now seemed almost cruel of Melinda to have fostered Kaspar so generously, as if she had stocked a bird feeder with seed in November, December, and January but now it was February and moving away she had left it empty. He was an adult, but she had indulged his childishness, and he had repaid her with a readiness to believe that one could follow one’s heart by the simple expedient of listening to it.

  “We have to give her up,” said Jacob.

  “It is so,” Kaspar agreed.

  Jacob felt he hadn’t yet been brutal enough. “We have to give up the whole idea,” Jacob tried again, telling himself that his cruelty was for Kaspar’s sake. “They’re going to find out the hard way.”

  “Who?”

  “Carl and Melinda,” Jacob answered in a whisper, not wanting them to overhear.

  “Ah, do you feel that?” Kaspar was studying Jacob with a look of concern.

  Jacob tried to think of a way to explain that Carl and Melinda had chosen to break the old forms; they had chosen the new way; and therefore they had to expect that the new way would try to break them. It was a mistake to think that in the new world they would be able to care in the old way. In the new world you had to find something of value and learn not to care for it. You had to learn how to sell it.

  “Are you distressed, Kuba?” Kaspar asked.

  Jacob shut himself up. “No. I thought you might be.”

  “I am sad,” Kaspar answered. “As I say, I would like to meet you again. Have you a telephone?”

  “Not any more. Do you have one?”

  “No.” Kaspar chuckled softly at this dead end.

  “We could leave notes at the language school,” Jacob suggested.

  “Yes, that is so,” Kaspar replied, but he didn’t seem to believe that Jacob would.

  “I could stop by your place,” Jacob offered. Jacob’s new apartment was located just on the other side of the war cemeteries from Kaspar’s.

  “I hope that you will,” Kaspar said. He took a deep breath, met Jacob’s eye, and then looked past him for a moment into the party that Jacob was about to return to. He smiled finally in farewell. “So, okay,” he said awkwardly, and was gone.

  “I need a beer,” said Carl, coming up behind Jacob.

  Jacob followed him and took a beer, too. Carl’s shirt, like Jacob’s, was patchy with sweat from dancing. A breeze came through the open window behind Henry’s refrigerator and played on them.

  “This won’t cost five crowns in Rome,” said Carl.

  “No,” agreed Jacob.

  “I wanted to be the one to tell you, you know,” Carl confessed. “I said I’d known you longer. But Melinda said she’d known you longer in Prague and that that was what mattered.”

  Jacob shrugged away the implication that the case was a delicate one.

  After a swig of beer, Carl continued: “We’re leaving in a few minutes, you know.”

  “You are?” Jacob said stupidly.

  “Hans invited Jitka to go home with him, so Jitka is offering us her apartment again for tonight.”

  Jacob nodded. The glass of the kitchen window behind Carl was dusty, and the dust caught and held a moonish glare thrown up by lights in the courtyard below. He and Carl would never live together again, not in Prague, Somerville, or anywhere else.

  “I understand,” said Jacob. This was as close as the two of them would ever be, so he looked at Carl carefully—at his ironic eyes and candid mouth. Carl looked the same but not the same as he always had, as if he were older or younger than he had been the last time Jacob had really looked at him. He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.

  “I’ll probably blow it,” Carl said, “but I’d never in a million years feel I had a right to a chance with Melinda even if I did know what I was doing with my life, so not knowing doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to hold back.”

  “It’ll work out,” said Jacob, trying to match Carl’s prosaic tone, and suddenly ashamed of the discouragement that he had tried to convey to Kaspar.

  Blinking his eyes, Carl pulled his steel-bead chain out from under his shirt and over his head. He wiped dry the metal pendant on the front of his pants. “I was going to give you this.”

  Jacob let Carl place the saint in his palm. It was still warm. “But you’re still traveling,” Jacob protested.

  “In a way.”

  “Italy’s not traveling?”

  “Do you want it or not?

  “Of course I want it,” Jacob said.

  “Okay, then.”

  He could have kissed Carl, but the point, he made himself remember, was that Carl was the one he didn’t kiss. He slipped the chain over his own head.

  “I don’t have one to give you in return.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Do you want Václav?”

  “Hamsters, Italy—doesn’t seem right somehow.”

  Václav remained silent and hidden nearby, inside his soup tureen, which had been placed in a cabinet for safekeeping during the party.

  In the event, Carl and Melinda stayed for another two hours, at which point, after a fluster of tears and hugs, they fled.

  * * *

  Annie cried on the sofa and accused anyone who tried to console her of not caring as much as she did. The rest returned to drinking and dancing. They seemed to grow almost angry in their revelry.

  “Tonight is the last night,” Jacob told Henry. “After this we can’t live just for living.”

  “Then we’re animals,” suggested Henry.

  “Animals who eat story.”

  “But we’re also the meat,” said Henry. Carl in leaving had taken with him their philosophy, and it was as if Henry and Jacob were casting about for a topic of conversation that Carl though absent might somehow still be taking part in. “We’re meat with cinema,” Henry said. Jacob’s skin prickled. It was a naming like one of Carl’s, the kind of understanding that they had been afraid of losing when they lost him. Henry repeated the words. Then he repeated them again and then kept repeating them, as if he were chanting. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. The words lost their meaning, as if he were unlocking and emptying them. The words became unfamiliar and abstract, and in this state they could have meant anything, and because of their purity, and because they were being consumed by the saying of them, they began, Jacob noticed with alarm, to seem to mean everything—to mean every aspect of the experience that Jacob was living through. He really was meat with cinema, and so was Henry. It was what they all were. Henry seized Jacob by the arms, and the two of them fell down together, Henry taking most of the blow, but one of Jacob’s elbows flowering in pain, though the pain seemed to be happening to another person. As they fell, Jacob thought: Oh, this is silly and grandiose, and I would never be so taken with it if I weren’t drunk and Henry weren’t my friend, but I am and he is and I understand what he means. His meaning, which he didn’t speak—Jacob intuited it as if a language teacher had acted it out instead of translating it—was that the two of them weren’t in fact falling; they were merely disregarding the world; the accident and pain were incidental to the establishment of an axis between them that was, for the moment, distinct from the world�
�s and untethered from it, drifting separately. For the moment they were taking a path of their own, and if the floor of the apartment happened to fall up and hit them while Henry was shouting his communication, while he was trying to persuade Jacob to hear it, to really hear what he was trying to say, then it was no more than a sign of the reality of their independence. The pain in Jacob’s elbow seemed far away; the only sensations near him were the words, the repeated words, Henry trembling as he shouted them, Jacob crouching and wincing against them almost in Henry’s arms. This was abandonment, Jacob thought, this feeling right now; this was what it felt like to be cut free.

  Šárka

  Oh, that valley was white with cherry blossoms everywhere. White and green, it was, with cherry blossoms and green, green grass. And through all that green and white, the river flowed like a silver ribbon. Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before?

  —Astrid Lindgren

  In a new private bakery, a block from where Jacob’s new tram let him off, he discovered cornflakes. Noticing a line in front of the bakery, he fell into it without knowing what it was for. The interior of the shop was trimmed with oak instead of the usual marbled white plastic. Wire baskets held golden loaves and batons; crumbs littered a blue tile floor. The cornflakes were on a high shelf behind the counter, facing out, ranged in a row like a boast.

  The red-and-white packaging was in German, but the photograph on the box fronts was unmistakable. For camouflage—almost as a decoy—Jacob first ordered half a dozen rohlíky. Then, as politely as he could, he asked if the miss wouldn’t mind also adding to his order one of those krabice there, if they were in fact for sale. They were, she conceded, and within twenty-four hours he had eaten all of one box’s contents. He bought two more boxes the next day. He then rationed himself, but not very strictly, and his appetite so alarmed the shop assistants that one at last asked him, incredulously, what by god he did with so many kornfléky. —I eat them, he admitted giddily. It was like saying he ate gold.

  He was unabashed now. It was what he had learned from Carl and Melinda, he felt, and he thought of himself as carrying the lesson with him under his shirt, in the form of Carl’s pendant. He was still pursuing his original search, but he saw now that he had to go about it with a certain selfishness, which, if pursued purely enough, would turn out to be something more than selfishness in the end, he hoped. The new approach was reinforced by the knowledge that he was going to have to leave Prague by the end of the summer. He had been admitted to graduate school, and he had decided to go. Any pleasure he took, therefore, he was going to have to take with a necessary cruelty, with an implicit farewell, with the foreknowledge that it was only for the moment that he took it at all.

  The Žižkovižkov apartment restored to him a solitude like the one he had known before Carl’s arrival. Though the building was much larger than the Stehlíks’—a proper apartment building rather than a villa—he never met anyone on the stairs or in the hallways. He returned to noticing such things as the sound of his own footfalls and the breath of air that cushioned a room when he first walked into it. He noticed the click of the bolt in its latch. If he wanted to, he was free to sit in the bedroom and watch a breeze toss the gauzy curtains quietly against the glass of the folded-open window. He didn’t have to come up with words for any of his thoughts; there was no one to convey them to. The window faced south, and after lunch he sometimes set a chair in front of it and read in the sun, putting his feet up on the radiator, which was quiet by day though it sometimes clanked to life for an hour or two in the evening.

  The apartment had a large, old wooden console radio, whose FM dial was orthodoxly limited to the Communist-approved frequencies, a few dozen megahertz lower than those on which Western Europe broadcast, or America for that matter. While Jacob cooked and ate dinner, he left it on, so as to give himself the sound of company. Sometimes, if he wasn’t making any effort to pay attention, patches of the Czech state radio news tumbled comprehensibly into his mind.

  He listened from the bathtub, too. On Mondays he always took a bath before dinner, because on Monday at eight p.m. the hot water stopped flowing and didn’t come back on until Thursday at the same hour—a shortcoming that the landlord had disclosed during negotiations but which Jacob hadn’t quite believed in at the time. The neighborhood’s hot water piping was undergoing repair. On weekdays, he rose early in order to have time to boil water, pot after steaming pot of which he poured cautiously into the tub and then diluted from the tap.

  As he perched on the edge of his tub one morning, combing the water with his fingers to mix the cool into the hot, and as birdsong peppered the morning air, it occurred to him that he didn’t expect to remember the Žižkovižkov apartment as clearly as the Stehlíks’. He didn’t have the sense that he was memorizing it. The weakness of his attention may have had something to do with the season, late spring, when one begins to forget how rare, in the longer sweep of the year, a pleasant day actually is and then even to forget to reproach oneself for failing to bear the rarity in mind.

  * * *

  Thom and Henry found a new haunt for the friends, a cavernous hall set deep in the basement of a postwar white marble building, otherwise deserted, at the upper end of Wenceslas Square. The hall had been rented by a square-dancing society, which sold tickets and beer to the general public, and a hand-painted banner across the entrance declared the hall, in English, to be the Country Club. The beer was cheap, the fiddling sharp, and the dancing sweaty. Mostly the friends drank, talked, and smoked at the club’s long tables, though sometimes they rose and jogged around on the sidelines. Now and then Annie was even able to persuade them into a more serious imitation of square dancing, in time to the music and in a simple four-four step. She and Henry hadn’t become a couple, but she retained a hold on him sufficient to oblige him to participate in such experiments, and she had always been able to browbeat Thom and Jacob. In the aftermath of Carl and Melinda’s defection, the boundaries of their circle had loosened, and they were joined on most nights by a few of the shorter-term expatriates who, in Carl’s wake, seemed to be drifting into the city in greater and greater numbers. In the post office one day, Thom recognized a young woman he had known at school—Elinor, who had what the British called ginger hair. Immediately upon Thom’s introduction of her at the Country Club, she was secured by Annie as an ally. Another new regular was Vincent, a young Tory with thick black curls and full lips, whom no one ever seemed to have invited but who insisted on showing up anyway, attracted by the pleasure of inserting himself into the conversation whenever it turned to intellectual matters. To Annie’s disgust, Vincent’s arguments contained frequent and apparently unconscious allusions to his family’s wealth and to the education that had been purchased for him with it. His accent, too, dismayed her, for reasons that Jacob was too American to appreciate: his vowels were boxy and inward, his consonants mildly slurred. Henry was willing to be debated by him, but Thom found him insufferable and Hans called him the class enemy to his face. Jacob, however, quietly supported his presence, with motives he knew to be low. Vincent was a beauty, and his arrogance reminded Jacob of Daniel’s, though it was clumsier—it was nature where Daniel’s was artifice. Jacob’s support irritated his friends, who regarded it as a lapse in judgment if not taste, but the defections had left Jacob impatient with the compromise he had struck with himself in the fall.

  This impatience eventually led him into adventures. He refused to go back to T-Club, but one night, after parting from his friends at the door of the Country Club, he waited until they were out of sight and then walked to Letná, the park around Stalin’s monument where Henry had once reported seeing men cruising. There, in the shadows, Jacob looked into the faces of circling men, as if in search of something. If he was trying out the role of outlaw, it would be wrong to be looking for approval, but before he could unravel this train of thought, he was nodded at by a wiry, birdlike man, who on closer approach proved to have fine hair and delicate features and to be only a
few years older than Jacob himself. The man was too well dressed to be Czech, and he admitted in nearly faultless English to having come that morning from Vienna, though properly, he said, he belonged to Malta, since he was a knight of Malta.

  “A knight?” Jacob asked. They were half whispering.

  “It is a form of rank,” he replied, putting on the sort of modesty that Jacob’s Harvard classmates had used when telling outsiders that they went to school “in Boston.” “And you are from the great republic. May I?” He interlaced the fingers of one of his hands with those of Jacob’s and playfully pulled Jacob toward him. “I have a great desire to.” They kissed for a while. “Shall we go to where I am staying? It is only a few steps from here.”

  It was somewhat more than a few steps, but the knight paid for the taxi. En route he caressed the underside of Jacob’s forearm, invisible to the driver, and cautioned Jacob that they would have to enter the building where he was staying in absolute silence. It wasn’t his apartment. He swore Jacob to secrecy (“you are now on your honor, you understand”) and explained that he had come to Prague on business for the church (which? solemnly: “Rome”). There was an understanding between the church and the knights of Malta, an old alliance against atheism, socialism, and other such forces in the world. Though the Communists had forbidden monastic life, a few heroic men had persevered, even in Prague, and had taken vows and lived in secret accordance with them, unknown to the civil authorities. Did Jacob know of this? The pope himself had granted these men their dispensation; their apartments became their cells. It was to such a cell that Jacob and the knight were traveling. The church had offered the empty bed of a monk now on a pilgrimage to Rome—a monk’s property, after all, was at his church’s disposal—in consideration of negotiations that the knight was to make in Prague on the church’s behalf. The apartment’s second monk—two lived there—was also scheduled to be away, though only for the night, and to make sure that he was in fact away, it would be more prudent if the knight entered the rooms first alone. It was preferable if Jacob could omit to notice the location of the apartment, and he must promise, if he did take note in spite of himself, never to return. He must never speak to the monks. They were under orders. They were not to know that Jacob had ever visited. Their apartment was, after all, tantamount to a monastery. It was wonderful to have such a place, the knight continued after a momentary pause. He looked very much forward to Jacob’s fucking him there.