Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  In the summer’s limit, Milo for his part seemed to see no more than a motive for bringing Jacob to experiences in Prague that Jacob had so far missed. At first he merely pointed out opportunities that Jacob was walking past unawares. Jacob was at this stage exploring Malá Strana in greater detail. He had neglected it because it lay on the far side of the river and a little too obviously in the way of the tourists who marched daily across the Charles Bridge to the castle, but he had come to feel that he ought to be bigger in spirit than to fear seeming like a tourist. Still, to distinguish himself from the tourists, he insisted on arriving in Malá Strana by a practical rather than a scenic route, rising into the district on the Malostranská subway station’s long, tedious escalator, two flights of which seemed to be permanently under repair, and then walking down a crooked alley, just as long and tedious if not quite as exhausting, that ran along the rear of several palaces and was lined on both sides with faceless concrete wall for most of its length.

  —There are gardens here, do you know? Milo asked, the third or fourth time Jacob led him down the charmless alley. —Take a look. He nodded at a heavy, unlabeled door the size of a horse and carriage, with a smaller door the size of a person cut into it.

  —This is allowed? Jacob asked, half to himself, as he pushed open the inner, person-size door. He saw a path of blue gravel crossing green lawn. He stepped carefully over the lower edge of the larger door that framed the smaller one.

  The gardens were laid out in a seventeenth-century pattern. Stiff, calf-high hedges drew squares around green lawns and within the lawns drew circles around flowerbeds. The flowers themselves had gone past; no more than a few white petals were still scattered in the leaves of the plants, which in the lateness of the season had grown from beauty into mere health, monotonously and diffusely green, washing up lazily against the woody hedges that encircled and contained them. At the corners of the sectioned lawns, bronze statues were streaked somewhat wildly with white and green verdigris. Water jetted from a statue of a woman and child into a large basin.

  —Is it pleasing to you? Milo asked.

  —It’s excellent. We have to come back.

  —But we are here now.

  Maybe it was the mistaken impression that they had stumbled onto a secret that had caused Jacob to imagine that the point of the place was to come back to it later.

  Two women sat gossiping on a stone bench in the shade while their children, elfishly thin, wearing nothing but underwear and sockless shoes, skipped from one hedged quadrant to another. The children had an inflatable red-and-white ball, and their game seemed to be to tag one another with it. It was so easy to dance away that in order to have any fun it was necessary for them to endanger themselves by coming needlessly close.

  —They aren’t shy, said Jacob.

  —Why would they be shy?

  —In America, even children, if they are not clothed…

  —But you’re not a Puritan, not you.

  —No, Jacob admitted. —But you and I…, he continued, but he trailed off. He had been going to defend America’s morals, or lack thereof, by pointing out that on Prague’s subways and trams he and Milo allowed no more than the backs of their hands to touch, but the touch had become a habit and Jacob found that he would rather let his point go than cast a light on it in any way critical.

  —Here you and I, said Milo, pointing at a bronze of two wrestling men. The figures didn’t seem to be Antaeus and Hercules—their four feet were planted on earth—but merely two Enlightenment gentleman-gymnasts, thick-muscled and delicately coiffed. Rain had blanched with verdigris the rippled chest of one of them, who stood upright, pushed slightly backward, exposingly, by his partner, who was bent over and was pulling toward him the upright man’s left thigh while pushing away his right shoulder. The upright man, who wore a trim moustache, looked down at the other with a look of concern, almost tender. A clean-minded viewer was supposed to understand that the statue represented the men just before the lower threw the upper off his balance, but as a statue the statue belied this interpretation, because it held them together eternally in poise, and where the lower man placed his hand on the upper one’s thigh, and the upper one placed his hand over that hand, it was just as possible to imagine that the pressure of the second hand was intended to confirm and hold that of the first one.

  —Like this? Jacob asked, and he abruptly bent over, grabbed Milo’s thigh, and made as if to shove away Milo’s opposite shoulder. Milo caught Jacob’s two hands in his and under the cover of rough-housing jestingly tried to keep Jacob for a moment in the lower man’s crouch, which in the statue brought the lower man’s face suggestively near the upper one’s fig leaf.

  —But be good, Milo said.

  —Good for what? When Jacob recovered, he continued to study the statue, glancing at it over his shoulder as he tried now to adopt the posture of the upright man. Was that what he and Milo looked like? he wondered. Not: Did they look muscled and naked. Not that aspect but the other: Did they look balanced. Did they look like two men touching each other. Of course they did, but it was strange to think about it. To think there might be something not unpleasant about it as well as for themselves in it. —Is this posture even possible? Jacob asked, to invite Milo to hold him again under the license of imitating the statue.

  —I think, that yes, Milo said. With assumed seriousness he set his feet in the crouching man’s position, one foot behind to anchor himself, the second in front and between Jacob’s legs. —And then, he continued deliberately,—I give a hand here, and a second hand here, and—

  He tumbled Jacob over.

  “Asshole!” Jacob said happily, lying on his back in the grass.

  —So trusting, these Americans.

  The gardens were so extensive and so cleverly planted with boscage along the periphery that from the vantage of the ground Jacob could look up toward the castle hill and imagine that no walls separated him from its summit. A cascade of terraces and allées carried the eye all the way up. In fact the terraces belonged to other gardens—the gardens of consuls and embassies, for the most part, Milo said, when Jacob pointed to them and asked. But the illusion was almost perfect.

  —But you see? Milo asked, after they returned to their feet and as they approached the central fountain. —There’s no Puritanism in Bohemia.

  From a young bronze matron’s left breast spurted a steady stream of water. A winged boy, whose hand she held as if they were dancing, turned up his lips to catch some. He wasn’t able to, but he peed uninhibitedly nonetheless from his little boy’s cock, while a dolphin, which he was standing on, spat a third, lesser arc.

  —The source of sources, Jacob said.

  —The sources of sources, Milo corrected. —Be liberal.

  * * *

  From impromptu suggestions Milo progressed to outright plans. He came up with the idea of taking Jacob to Amerika, an old quarry a few kilometers southwest of Prague that had become a swimming hole, and on a Saturday morning he picked Jacob up in his father’s army green Trabant, two folded towels and two bottles of Mattoni seltzer in the back seat, his Konica around his neck. They followed a highway south along the left bank of the Vltava until the highway veered west from the river and zigzagged. The city then folded itself up and away from them, and they found themselves driving through fields of yellow flowers. Sun fell generously across their laps. They rolled their windows down, and with his fingers Jacob made shapes that cut different sounds out of the warm air that they were speeding through.

  —We will be able to swim, Milo explained. —But better we don’t drink, you know?

  —Is it dangerous?

  —It’s America.

  They passed through a few small towns until, outside of any town, they came to a line of cars parked irregularly beside the road. Milo pulled onto the shoulder. The farmland here was planted with grasses that had grown so long and heavy that they had lain down in still-living sheaves like parted hair. Along an erratic path afforded by these
parts, three middle-aged men were picking their way toward a thicket. The men had stripped to European-style swimsuits, over which their grizzled bellies hung, and they encouraged and mocked one another in voices that were no doubt amplified by beer. Milo, already wearing his swimsuit under his jeans, stood guard while a bashful Jacob changed into his more modest American-style swimming trunks in the car. Jacob was excited by the momentary peril of exposure. The fake leather of the seat felt cool under his naked ass. He wasn’t able to see his own cock and balls reflected in the glass of the windshield; the angle was wrong.

  They crossed the field and took a dirt path through the thicket, which gave way to meadow, which gave way to thicket again. The path was marked with white paper signs taped to trees, written in the formal Czech that Jacob had trouble deciphering.

  —Does this say ‘forbidden’?

  —If you read it.

  —To whom belongs the land here?

  —It’s maybe still the state’s? I don’t know.

  The disregard was of a piece with the general liberation, not yet attenuated—the dispensation that the Czechs and Slovaks were still under to live as if no authority had more responsibility for them than they had for themselves.

  Ahead, at a stand of pines, a cluster of people were admiring the artificial canyon, which they had at last reached. The irregular gorge was maybe half a mile long and as deep as a seven- or eight-story building. Toward the bottom, it was spanned by a sheet of water, so unmoving and transparent that one saw clearly the continuity of the rocks above and below it—saw the two faces of the gorge run down the opposing cliffs to meet underwater and fold knottily together, the submersion making no interruption to the eye apart from the slight compression and redirection that light is subject to when passing between water and air. Here and there, an outcropping of yellow, rectangularly chipped limestone reached across the water’s surface like a clumsy claw; elsewhere, a curved, grassy dais formed the shore, and people lay on it sunbathing. The exposed rock of the cliff faces was reddish tan; its parallel wrinkles ran in grand arches, like those on Auden’s face in photographs.

  —Like at home, isn’t it? Milo asked.

  —Exactly.

  —Wait, I’ll eternalize you.

  After the photo, Milo insisted on going first down the ledge. Erosion had rendered it slightly dangerous, and he had been down it before. As they descended, he kept looking back to make sure Jacob noticed which boulders he trusted with his weight and which tree roots, laced into the face of the cliff, he used as handholds. As the cliff walls rose higher, the rim of the gorge above them began to seem to make a cutout of the blue sky, and Jacob became aware that the sun needed its full summer height in order to peep down at them, as if they were looking up at it from the bottom of a well. When, as they made their way down, small stones were dislodged by their steps and skittered over rocks in falling, the echoes ricocheted so loudly that it seemed almost redundant for Milo to call out, “Pozor! Pozor!” to those below.

  They walked until they found a dais with an unoccupied patch of grass in the sun. They spread their towels. Milo stripped off his shirt and shucked off his pants. At the sight of him, Jacob’s desire was loud to his own perception, but with an effort he understood that the people sitting near them on the dais couldn’t hear it and that their deafness left him free, and after a while he relaxed enough to take off his shirt, too, and lay beside Milo, eyes closed, the sun warming his blindness.

  In the orange darkness, he was drawn into the spirit of Milo’s joke—of having brought an American to Amerika—and he let go of his certainty as to which country he was in. For clues there were only the sun, the dry touch of the air, and the bony soil that he could feel through the towel beneath him. When he opened his eyes, he noticed that colors had been bleached out of his sight by the sun; the gestures frozen into the cliff face across the water seemed gray and the hot sky almost white. Was nature nature everywhere? Or was this a different nature than the one he had been born into? This wasn’t Texas heat, just a pleasant representation of it. On the other hand, the setting hardly suggested Europe. One was unsheltered here. No one seemed to be following any rules that the people present hadn’t themselves made up.

  —About what will you write? Milo asked, led perhaps by a similar train of association to think of the world that Jacob would before long be returning to. In late-night conversations, Jacob had confided some of his ambitions to Milo.

  —I don’t know.

  —I think, that you will be a big writer, and I, your secret friend.

  —But leave it, Jacob pleaded. —Probably I will write about America, he said. It was with something like this solemn intention, after all, that he was ending his year of travel.

  —Then it was a good idea, this excursion.

  —I mean, the big America.

  —But we are in the Big Amerika, Milo replied. —It is this particular canyon. Over there is Little Amerika. Do you want to see Mexiko?

  —And what else?

  —Switzerland. Milo pointed west. —You know, the business that will employ me is Australian. Perhaps sometimes they will alternate the personnel, between countries. Have you visited Australia?

  —No, Jacob admitted.

  Milo looked a little pensive. —There too there are cowboys.

  It was frustrating not to be able to touch each other.

  —Do you still see Ota? Milo continued, after a pause.

  —No longer, said Jacob.

  —I, too, no longer.

  They sat up, and Milo drank some of his seltzer. He didn’t want to go in the water, which was ice cold, but Jacob waded in, taking care not to cut his feet on the sharp rocks, the edges of which were easy to see. Once he was halfway in, he shudderingly propelled himself off an underwater ledge; because he was among strangers he held in his natural yelp at the chill. He dog-paddled out and upon turning saw that Milo was documenting his swim. By the time he reached the shore again his feet were so numb with cold that he emerged unsteadily, on all fours for caution.

  Before driving home, while still wearing their swimsuits, they ate pork cutlets and dumplings in a nearby town, in a pub whose dining room was a sort of greenhouse in the middle of a farm. Through the glass walls they watched the sun set over flat farm lands, losing none of its purity of color as it descended, though the sky around it, at the moment the sun touched the horizon, deepened like a rock picked up from a river bank and dipped in the water. Afterglow still lit the sky when they began their drive back to Prague, but it was dark by the time they arrived in Strašnice, the district where Milo’s father lived. They parked the Trabant on the street, and Milo ran up to his panelák apartment with the car keys to say good night. When he reemerged from the white building, he and Jacob walked the mile to Žižkov—not far enough to be worth waiting for a night bus—along empty streets.

  * * *

  Jacob had never been to , a park in the western part of the city, because it had always sounded tacky to him. But it has a replica of the Eiffel Towel, Milo pointed out. Exactly, Jacob replied. Milo pretended to be shocked by his philistinism.

  They decided to go on a Tuesday. Jacob was free from teaching that afternoon; the only hitch was that they had to wait for Jacob’s landlord to stop by and pick up the June rent. To pass the time, they drifted into the bedroom and lay crosswise on the red-and-black checkerboard of the duvet, and its design suggested to them another game with simple rules, often played with little strategy.

  The landlord had no suspicion that he was interrupting. He was too genial. In the negotiations for the apartment, he had invited Jacob to pay in a combination of cash and English lessons; Jacob had insisted on cash, but now, in Jacob’s kitchen, the man began to ask in English how Jacob found the stove, the refrigerator, the sink. He gestured for nouns he didn’t know, and Jacob was too polite and by now too much by second nature a teacher to fail to supply them. The only escape that Jacob could think of was to explain that he and Milo were on their way to and to
invite the man to accompany them to the tram. Jacob wanted, and knew Milo wanted, to finish what they had begun, but Jacob couldn’t couldn’t think of a suitable lie. By the time they had waved good-bye to the landlord, they were already on their way.

  It may have been the state of yearning that reminded Jacob of Daniel; yearning was after all as far as Jacob had ever really got with him. He wondered what Daniel would think of Milo. In practice, although Daniel hadn’t wanted Jacob for himself, he had never approved of anyone Jacob had shown an interest in. But in theory, at least, Daniel would have to recognize in Jacob’s new indifference to consequences, in his capacity to embrace the example of Carl and Melinda, evidence that Jacob had at last reached the sort of skeptical, adult perspective that Daniel had despaired of his attaining. And it wasn’t going to be possible for Jacob to be hurt. Nothing like what had happened with Luboš could happen now. He was moving too fast.

  He and Milo walked up the broken escalators of the Malostranské station behind two conscripts in uniform. Each conscript’s cap, neatly folded, was tucked into the buttoned-down epaulet loop on his jacket’s shoulder, above where his stripes would go if he ever earned any. Jacob wondered if conscripts were instructed to carry their caps this way or whether it was a perennial innovation, which every cohort came up with by themselves. The conscripts took the steps lightly and steadily, their faces unflushed, their voices not winded. In a crowd, conscripts always looked healthier than their fellow citizens. Jacob didn’t think it was only on account of their youth. Was it the effect of regular exercise? Maybe the economy had been planned so as to give them a better grade of food.

  —Must you go into the service sometime? Jacob asked Milo.

  —That’s how Dad found out. I told him, that I didn’t have to.

  —Because you’re gay.

  —Many say it. So he can’t be quite sure.

  —A pity.

  —It isn’t.

  —A pity, I mean, that you had to present yourself as…