Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  —As I am.

  —Well, yeah, you have the truth. But your friends from university, what with them?

  —A lot are in the service, Milo admitted. They were arriving in the glass box that topped the subway station. —But I thought to myself, that at the moment there are opportunities, and I have to make use of them.

  They headed down the long blank street where Milo had a week or so before shown Jacob the door to the Renaissance gardens. They walked past the door this time. They crossed . A few minutes later, they came to the American embassy, a Prague palace that Jacob’s country had somehow infused, in occupying it, with the national qualities of blandness and force.

  —When my friends went off to the service, I got to know Ota.

  —Downstairs? Jacob asked. The word had been one of Ota’s ways of referring to T-Club.

  —Downstairs, exactly.

  Two American soldiers, armed but in relaxed postures, stood in a driveway that led under an arch to gardens in back of the embassy, which were forbidden to visitors. The soldiers paid no attention to Jacob and Milo, even though Jacob, made a little hungry by the sight of men who were such types of blandness and force, stared at them and at as much of the gardens as he could catch a glimpse of. On the sidewalk, a dozen or so Czechs were in a line, waiting with familiar patience to file visa applications.

  —I remember, said Jacob, —that he was funny, when I met him.

  —He’s witty. Such friends I didn’t have before. And even if…

  —Even if?

  —Nothing, Milo backpedaled. —I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s complete shit, what I was going to say. The street twisted sharply as it climbed a hill. —We’re living through a time of changes.

  They didn’t need to look back at all of them. —I still have his cassette, Jacob said.

  —Of what?

  —Depeche Mode.

  —That is fearfully typical of him.

  Beyond the embassy, the street ran along the crown of an escarpment, curved left, and turned into a grassy path that led into . Nothing sheltered Jacob and Milo from the midafternoon sun, and they were conscious that they remained visible to any one on the street behind them. The castle overlooked them, far above, and anyone looking out a rear window of the American embassy could also have seen them. Out of caution, it wasn’t until the path began to wind between trees, which were burgeoning with green, that Jacob took Milo’s hand. Milo didn’t resist. It was a weekday afternoon and the park was empty. They were once again in a version of what Czech speakers of English tended to refer to as “the nature.” It seemed to be Milo’s instinct to bring Jacob into it.

  —Here are apple trees, Milo said, using a word different from the one for the fruit, though similar enough that Jacob was able to recognize it.

  Jacob backed Milo up against one of them. He remembered the dark, clear bark from orchards in Grafton.

  —It isn’t a bother? Jacob asked, after he kissed him.

  —It isn’t a bother, Milo replied. He tugged at the hair at the back of Jacob’s neck, which had grown a little long. —You need a clipping.

  —Do you know how?

  —Absolutely not. But maybe you want to be a longhair.

  After a while Jacob noticed that they were walking among a different kind of tree, which had blossomed so recently and so abundantly that papery and translucent petals were still scattered in the grass below.

  —Cherries, Milo explained. —When I was a little boy, Mother liked to come here, when the flowers for the first time open.

  —It’s pretty.

  —Now they’re gone by. You’ll have to return, if you want to see them.

  It wasn’t a thing that could last, Jacob told himself, for the sake of discipline. Milo suggested they sit down in the sun.

  —How is the school, which you will attend in the fall? Milo asked.

  —It’s English literature, but it’s not important.

  —No?

  —I’m going to be a writer, he reminded Milo.

  —And you won’t need literature?

  —I’ll write my own.

  Because he was going to leave, he had been keeping himself on good behavior. Since it wasn’t going to last, a lifetime of effort wasn’t necessary, only a couple of months—a matter of weeks, really—and he was better for this moderate exercise of willpower, he was sure, than he had ever been before. But because it wasn’t going to last, it was just as feasible to get away with bad behavior—to be in some ways worse than he had ever been before—to let Milo think he was someone he wasn’t, for example, or wasn’t yet, in any case—to play out what was between them as if it were a daydream of getting everything he wanted. As if the story could be made to run according to his wishes, free of all checks. One day, when he was a child, he had been playing with another boy in the backyard of his parents’ home in Houston, and he had made something up. There had been a sprinkler; the boys had been wearing their swimsuits. He had invented a game. Did it go back as far as that? He had put his arms around the boy. The leaves of grass in Texas lawns were paler and fatter, less mixed with the straw of what died in winter.

  —Will you sell to the films?

  —For millions.

  —Maybe you will write me letters, between your novels.

  —Maybe, but I will be very famous.

  —But right now you’re mine, Milo asserted.

  —Yes, Jacob quietly admitted. —You see?

  —An opportunity of the moment.

  He was deceiving Milo for the sake of the look in his eyes.

  * * *

  Everyday life continues during a love affair, though it loses any power to be menacing. One sees it as if from the other side of the room. It can’t issue verdicts or decide meanings and becomes for the interim no more than something to appreciate or humor, as the case may be, unless the lovers on a whim choose to bring a moment of it inside the boundary, invisible to others, that has been drawn around them.

  Jacob paid no less attention to his teaching but he no longer worried about it. At the language school, whenever his students couldn’t guess a word’s meaning, he liked to draw a picture on the chalkboard. His drawings used to be clumsy, but suddenly he seemed to have a knack for them, which he recognized, when he studied himself a little, as no more than a new, happy indifference to whether the drawings came out so badly that his students laughed at them—as sometimes they still did.

  A lover’s detachment fell in conveniently with a complication of mood that had come over the city. Before Jacob’s arrival, the story of the revolution had held everyone tightly, he imagined, but the season of late spring that they were now passing through was not the first to follow the revolution but the second. The revolution was receding into the past; its grip as a story was weakening. There was a general sense of unraveling, of drift, of inconsequentiality. In their thoughts people were beginning to go their separate ways. It wouldn’t have been tactful to make too much of it; there was no point in throwing the fact of differentiation in anyone’s face. It went largely undiscussed.

  It was perceptible, though, in new patterns of life. Catercorner to the new bakery where Jacob had begun to buy cornflakes, one day a new butcher’s shop appeared, where it was possible to buy fresh pork chops and beef steaks, as well as better grades of sausage than the government-run shops kept in supply. When the bakery had opened, a crowd had rushed in to try it. But no crowd gathered at the new butcher’s. There were now so many new shops that no single one was any longer a matter of general public interest. The butcher’s prices were fairly high, and it was beginning to occur to people that not everyone would be able to afford every new shop that opened. Some shops were going to be for some people; others, for others. Some shops would be reserved implicitly for special occasions, which would come at different times to different people. One’s pride was at stake, and as a measure of prudence, one had to begin to think a little more narrowly, keeping in mind one’s personal wishes and means rather than those
of the average worker—the ideal customer that the old shops, in their uniformity, had been addressed to.

  It contributed to Jacob’s awareness of the dispersal that the end of the school year was soon going to break up his classes at the language school. He was going to miss the regularity and sense of purpose they provided, as well as the students themselves. For a month now, the editors of the Charles University student newspaper, the ones who Rafe had introduced him to, had been putting off their sessions from week to week pleading the need to prepare for exams, and at this point Jacob no longer expected to meet with them again. Though the academic calendar didn’t affect his other private students, the new restlessness did. One day after class at the chemistry institute, the well-dressed Pavel rose and with a certain deliberateness shook Jacob’s hand.

  “I must thank you,” he said. “I have a new post, and I believe that English was of assistance.”

  “You spoke beautiful English long before I arrived,” Jacob replied.

  “I am not so sure.”

  “Congratulations, though. What’s the job?”

  “I will be a senior research designer in composite materials. It is with an Austrian firm, in Linz.”

  “Don’t they speak German?”

  “I happen to speak German also, but I believe, that they appreciate my English.”

  In order to listen in, the pretty Zuzana had delayed getting up from her chair. Now she observed, “He is brilliant in languages and in chemistry, Pavel.”

  “He is too young to know German,” complained the elderly Bohumil, who had also been eavesdropping. “He is too clever for his age.”

  “And you, for your age,” Pavel retorted. “Bohumil also speaks German, very well.”

  “Everyone of my generation speaks it,” Bohumil said, swatting away the compliment. “One had the impression here, for a while, that it was going to be the Weltsprache.”

  Jacob wished Pavel luck. Ivan lingered; he also had news. Over the weekend he had met with a young businessman who had a new idea. He proposed to teach through television; after all, there was one in almost every home already, even in Czechoslovakia. The man would very much like to meet Jacob. He was perhaps Jacob’s age. Could Ivan bring Jacob to his office?

  “Are you going to work for him?” Jacob asked.

  “I suspect, that I am not. But it is an opportunity for you, I think.”

  As Jacob walked to his bus stop, Ivan described the man’s office on the northern periphery of the city, in a concrete building that the authorities had erected as a temporary structure not long after World War II but had never got around to demolishing and replacing. It didn’t have many windows. A tram depot was across the street. Through the fence one could see some trams of an older design, which no longer ran, but which Ivan remembered from childhood.

  “I’m going back to America pretty soon, I think,” Jacob said.

  “But it is an opportunity,” Ivan persisted. He drew his right hand up and out, an expansive gesture not at all in keeping with his usual birdlike manner. He must have picked it up from the young businessman.

  “I don’t think I should,” Jacob said. He felt that he was being ungrateful and slightly cruel.

  That night he met his expatriate friends at the Country Club. At the back of the building’s lobby, at the top of the stairs that led into the basement hall, it was possible to look over the banister and survey the rows of folding tables below. At first Jacob didn’t see anyone he knew. He had arrived a little early; perhaps he was the first one. The dance floor was empty; the dedicated dancers, distinguishable by green knickers on the men and red aprons on the women, were drinking in a loose group at the bar in the far corner. A hum of talk was diffused by the hall’s echoes and rose generally, like the cigarette smoke, which, as it was stirred by the hall’s hot lights, dissolved into a glare that filled the volume of the room. Down into this brightness Jacob squinted until at last he spotted Annie at a distant table. Elinor was sitting daintily across from her, and Vincent next to Annie, his large hands folded on the table in front of him. Jacob took the stairs quickly.

  “Do you know if any of the fellows are coming?” Vincent asked at once.

  “The fellows?” Jacob echoed.

  “Vincent doesn’t care to be sentenced to a night of conversation with women,” said Annie.

  “Not a night of conversation, no,” replied Vincent.

  “You see?” said Annie. “Elinor and I were just having a chat about Czech ice cream. I’m partial to the apricot myself.”

  “Have you been to the place in ?” Jacob asked. It was the one Milo had taken him to, on the day that Milo had picked him up in the bookstore.

  “They give you a biscuit with it there, don’t they. A wafer, I suppose you would call it. No, that’s not right. A cookie. Is that the word?”

  “I must try it out,” Vincent said, as if Annie had urged him to go.

  “You haven’t heard from Melinda,” Annie suggested.

  “No.”

  “I thought by now surely one of us would have done.”

  “Where are these friends of yours?” Vincent asked.

  Annie looked at him without answering.

  “Rome, we’re pretty sure,” said Jacob.

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I quite like Rome,” Vincent said.

  Thom and Jana arrived. Jana was beginning to show, and the effort of walking down the stairs lightly flushed her face, which seemed to have taken on some of the translucency of an infant’s complexion.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Annie whispered. Then, aloud: “And how are the two of you keeping?”

  “Jana’s grand, as you see, but I seem to have put on a little flesh.” Thom opened his coat and swiveled. “Am I in danger of losing my girlish figure, do you think?”

  “Would it be the pivo?” Annie wondered.

  “I say, that it is a bun in his oven,” said Jana.

  “Wouldn’t that be a state of affairs, if we could both have come down with one at once?”

  “Like earthworms or something,” said Jacob.

  “Earthworms are hermaphrodites, aren’t they?” said Vincent. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “What have you done to me, my dear?”

  Thom and Jacob went to fetch a round: Mattoni for Jana, glasses of Staropramen for everyone else. When they returned and set the glasses down on the red-and-white gingham, the disks of the liquid’s surface trembled.

  “Will the poetry corner be having any more meetings?” Annie asked. “I don’t suppose you will, now Carl’s gone.”

  “What’s this?” Vincent interposed.

  “For a while we tried to have a writing group.”

  “Jana here was telling us she’s going to be working as a writer,” Annie said.

  “As a translator,” Jana amended.

  “For that paper,” Annie explained. “The one that’s published here in English. There must be loads of Harvs on it, I should think.”

  “That’s great,” Jacob congratulated Jana.

  “They pay little,” she replied, “but perhaps I shall learn something, if I will be clever.”

  “Did you know that their reporters don’t speak Czech?” Annie asked Jacob.

  “No.”

  “Nor I. Should we have tried to write for it, do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Vincent broke in: “I should have thought that sort of thing would be very much up your street, Jacob.”

  “It didn’t occur to me.” He thought of journalism as Daniel’s turf—was that it?

  “Wasn’t Hemingway a journalist, before he wrote his stories?” Vincent asked.

  “Are you a Hemingway fan?” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t know that I’d call myself a fan. There’s something to him, certainly.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Annie said and nodded with false vigor.

  “Must you always be slagging me off?” Vincent complained.

  “You mustn’t make such claims
if you’re so sensitive.”

  Maybe journalism was too close to what Jacob wanted. Too close but not the thing itself. At a newspaper, Americans would have collected and condensed their ideas about the city. They would have passed the ideas back and forth until they had become a kind of currency, and they would expect to be able to buy him with this currency and for him to try to pay for his admission to their circle with it. It surprised him to find that he was still straining to keep himself pure. Evidently he was still on a quest.

  Annie interrupted his thoughts. “Am I mad to think I can just keep on at the Jazyková škola in September? There’s so much that’s changing.”

  “They’ll keep it open,” said Jacob. “It’s a state school.”

  “Everyone else seems to have a plan of some kind.”

  “You really are going to stay.”

  “I told you I might do.”

  A microphone whined briefly. The musicians had been unhurriedly gathering in the corner where they performed, and some began to pluck at the strings of their instruments, tuning them. There was a velvet thud as the caller touched his microphone and then a sound like someone pulling a crick out of his neck as the caller twisted it to adjust the height. —Ladies and gentlemen, the caller said in Czech, but the musicians signaled that they weren’t ready yet, and he didn’t continue. Dancers took last swigs of their beers and trotted out to their places on the floor.

  “Milo took me swimming last weekend,” Jacob told Annie, not privately.

  “Did he.”

  “Where did you go?” Jana asked. “To the stadium at Podolí?”

  “He took me to a quarry that he said was called Amerika.”

  “Ah, Amerika! And did you like?” Jana asked.

  “It was very nice,” Jacob said, nodding. “It’s an old limestone quarry that’s filled up with springwater,” he added, still trying to interest Annie.

  “They turn there all our films about the American West,” Jana explained. “So we Czechs think it is literally America. Were the people, how do you say, without clothes?”

  “Nudist? You know, there were a couple of people who didn’t seem to be wearing much, but I didn’t think I should look.”

  “That would rather spoil the effect, I should think, not looking,” said Thom.