Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  —But where do you live? It felt like a breach of an unspoken contract for Jacob to ask.

  —Far from the center, was all that Luboš would say. —Don’t be angry, Kuba. We’ll see each other soon.

  * * *

  There was a going-away party for Michael the next evening at a bar in Malá Strana. The street door of the bar was unmarked, like a speakeasy’s, but it opened and closed too often for Jacob to mistake it. Inside, a long, narrow room was crowded with tables of loud, oblivious, uninterruptible drinkers, none of whom Jacob recognized, but a staircase in back led down to a warren of further rooms, with pale yellow walls and a bar of their own, and here Jacob found everyone packed into a corner where they did not quite fit, their cigarettes open on the table before them for one another’s taking.

  “I’m going to Berlin after all,” said Annie, when he sat down beside her. Her eyes were bright with the news. “If such as Michael can feck off to where he likes, when he likes, so can I, you know.”

  “Oh, no, don’t go, Annie.”

  “I’m not off for good just yet. I’m going week after next to have a look around. Thom is covering for me at the school. Why don’t you find someone to cover for you as well, and we can go and interview together?” She added, confidentially, “It’s a real city, so far as your interests are concerned. If you know what I mean.”

  The last few months would turn out to have been a detour, if he followed her. Leaving would be a kind of revenge on what had frustrated him here. At his age it was in his power to start over as often as he liked, and he wouldn’t have that power forever.

  “Would you miss your friend, is that it?” Annie asked.

  “I’m not expecting anything from him.”

  “That’s not quite what I asked.”

  “He’s probably sleeping with someone else.”

  “You think he’s cheating on you?”

  “He’s probably cheating when he’s with me, if there are any rules to break, but I don’t think there are. Evidently that’s how it’s supposed to be with homosexuals.”

  “Homosexuals—where?” interrupted Melinda, turning to them.

  “Hush,” said Annie.

  “Here, actually,” Jacob volunteered.

  “Darling, how lovely. I’d been hoping, but I didn’t want to pry and you’re not so obvious. But how is it supposed to be with homosexuals, exactly? I missed that part, in my eavesdropping.”

  “No one is allowed to limit anyone’s options.”

  “Man is dog to man, is that it? I’ve heard tell of that. It sounds very exciting to an outsider, but it might be a lot of rot, you know. The sort of thing men say when it’s convenient.”

  “But it’s men on both sides, or rather all sides, in this case.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to believe them any more than we do.”

  “Well, it’s what I was told,” Jacob said. “By a Thatcherite in Boston,” he added.

  “Yes, I hear you have them in America, too, now. I’m so sorry. And is it catching in Prague as well, is that what you’re finding?”

  “I guess so. The free market. Or maybe it’s just that he likes the other guy better.” But he pictured Collin as he said this, and added, “But I don’t believe it.”

  “Nor I. Is any of this for general consumption, by the way?”

  “No. If you don’t mind.”

  “I shan’t tell Rafe, then. He wouldn’t mind at all, but he has no discretion.”

  “We’re going to Berlin together,” Annie put in.

  “Not you, too, Jacob? But you can’t, not just as I’ve found you out. It would be like having to wrap the Christmas presents up again and put them back under the tree.”

  “One earns actual cash in Berlin, Mel,” Annie explained.

  “Your mother sends you the loveliest packages of fruit and chocolates. I don’t see what you need hard currency for.”

  “But she doesn’t send nice Marlboros, like the ones Jacob has.”

  “Now that would be a mother indeed. Where does Jacob get them, I wonder.”

  “All the Harvs have a few extra dollars here and there,” Annie observed. “From their government no doubt. For the work they do for the Agency.”

  “I buy them with the money from my plane ticket home,” Jacob said. “I cashed it in.”

  “Was that wise?” Melinda asked, laying one of her white hands on his forearm. “Perhaps I needn’t worry too hard about your leaving us after all.”

  “Excuse me, excuse me.” Thom clambered over them as he made his way out of the corner. “Are you going to have a pivo, Jacob, or are you going to piss away your evening in mere talk?”

  Jacob followed him to the bar.

  “I must admit I’ll be sorry to see the wanker go,” Thom confessed, as he pulled a twenty-crown note out of his wallet.

  “But you’ll have your apartment back.”

  “Ah no, Michael’s been sleeping on Henry’s sofa, not mine. I’m at the with Annie, and they don’t allow us guests. But I’ll wager Henry is pleased, come to think of it. One for you. Does Annie need another? That makes an order of five, then. , prosím. A great relief, because I dread to say the number four. Can you say it, Jacob? A diabolical word. They laugh at me quite brutally but I hear that even Havel can’t pronounce that consonant in the middle of it.”

  Next to them, Rafe and Kaspar were discussing something in German, but they switched into English when Jacob tried to listen.

  “I was saying to Kaspar,” Rafe explained, leaning toward Jacob’s ear, “there was a report this morning at the ministry, from somebody at the WHO, that the death rate is climbing across Eastern Europe. A very slight but steady uptick.”

  “Chernobyl?” Jacob suggested.

  “No, that’s good, that’s very good, but the curves are the wrong shape. It’s not anything, apparently, or not anything you could do anything about—not malnutrition or an obvious problem like that. It’s accidents. People having their strokes or heart attacks a little sooner than they ordinarily would, that sort of thing.”

  “And I say, it is capitalism,” Kaspar said.

  “It’s exciting, capitalism,” Rafe continued. “Makes the ticker go a little faster.” He was speaking in the ironic, amoral, speculative tone of voice that at Harvard had been the specialty of the boys from the better prep schools.

  “They don’t even have capitalism here yet,” Jacob demurred.

  “I know!” Rafe rejoined. “Think what’ll happen when they do.”

  “You are in a strange place,” Kaspar said, thinking aloud.

  “Who—us?” Rafe asked.

  “Yes. You bring capitalism here without bringing it with you.”

  “I don’t follow,” Rafe objected.

  Kaspar spoke softly, perhaps a dissident’s habit, and Rafe and Jacob had to cock their ears toward him to hear. “You none of you have money, and forgive me, you will not make money, not you. You do not have such souls. I am speaking of all of you here, in this group, not you or you especially. This is a lovely thing about you. But it means you are dangerous. You are—what is the word—tempting, perhaps.”

  “Seductive,” Rafe supplied.

  “Yes, like a charming woman, or a charming boy.” He paused to chuckle over his evenhandedness. “You do not even seem to care about money, but you bring the anxiety with you, the anxiety you do not show.”

  “The anxiety about money,” Rafe said.

  “Yes, but it is a larger anxiety, too. It is an anxiety about place, about your place. We do not have it here. It was taken from us, you may say. We are not accustomed to it.”

  “We’re like missionaries,” Jacob offered, thinking he saw Kaspar’s point.

  “Yes, you do not know you are bringing it. You think you are bringing something else.”

  “Like missionaries with smallpox,” Rafe joked.

  “No, it is psychological, after all,” Kaspar insisted. “It is that you believe that you would never take anything from us. And
we feel that in you, we know that it is true, and so we cannot resist you.”

  “Wow,” Rafe said, raising his eyebrows. “How about that? That’s quite a compliment.”

  “Well, no,” Jacob objected. “I think he’s saying the people of Eastern Europe should mince us up for the try-pots before it’s too late.”

  “Oh, it is too late,” Kaspar assured them. “Since Kerensky, I think, it is too late.”

  “Of course it could be that missionaries make nothing happen,” Rafe added, as an afterthought. “It could be that they arrive early but don’t actually do anything to further the imperialist cause.”

  “I hope that’s it,” Jacob said. “I would rather not believe we’re making straight the way for McDonald’s.”

  He finished his beer and ordered another; he wanted to catch up with his friends. A fine haze hung in the low room; at one table, four young Czechs played cards with a studied intensity, in poorly made, neatly ironed shirts, as conscious of their serious poses as college students in a film of the French New Wave. “Putnam!” shouted Michael, his cap turned backward, summoning Jacob to the pool table to make a fourth in a game with Henry and Thom. They played loudly and badly. When it was three games to one, Jacob and Thom losing, the four of them realized at the same time that they had to take a restroom break, and they all filed into the small lavatory together. There was only one toilet and one urinal. Michael, who came third, unbuttoned his fly and began to pee at once into the sink.

  “Keep an eye on the door, there,” Michael told Jacob. “We don’t want any Czechs seeing this.”

  “We don’t want to frighten them with your impressive manhood, is that it,” said Thom, from the urinal, which was adjacent. “Or is it your appalling disregard for personal hygiene?”

  “We don’t want them to get the idea they needn’t wait in queues. It would be the collapse of all social order in Czechoslovakia.”

  His dick was unself-consciously exposed. Jacob leaned against the door to keep it shut.

  “Bloody poof, showing yourself like that,” Thom continued. “Have you no shame?”

  “Keep your hands to yourself, now, and don’t worry your pretty head. It all goes to the same place in the end.”

  “As the vicar said to the schoolgirl.”

  “I don’t know as I’ve heard that one.”

  “Me neither, as it happens.”

  “You’re a stupid git, you know.”

  “And I’ll miss you, too, once you’re gone,” Thom answered, and flushed for punctuation.

  Henry said only, “I think I’ll take a pass on washing me hands.”

  * * *

  On Thursday night, there was a sharp knock at the door just as Jacob was putting away the last of his groceries. Though he imagined it would be at the door, it was her father, Vladimír. He was a tall, good-looking man with gray hair as thick as a metal-bristled brush and dark lips that outlined his mouth. He kept his eyes fixed on Jacob’s when he spoke, as if he were administering a test of character, challenging Jacob to return his gaze as steadily as he gave it. He insisted on speaking in English.

  “Good evening, Mr. Jacob.” It sounded as if he had rehearsed, in order to be sure of himself in Jacob’s language. Though the form of address sounded humorous in English, it would have been correct in Czech, and perhaps a little more than correct. Such a form acknowledged the intimacy of people who had dealings with each other but established a certain air of respect between them. Jacob returned the civilities, and Mr. Stehlík then asked, “It is good here?”

  Since Mr. Stehlík made no gesture as he spoke and did not glance away, it took Jacob a moment to understand that he was referring to the apartment Jacob was renting. “It’s great; it’s perfect,” Jacob replied.

  “That is good.” Only now did Mr. Stehlík glance around him at the kitchen they were standing in, as if it would not have been proper for him to notice Jacob’s use and enjoyment of the premises until he had been given this reassurance. Jacob was suddenly conscious of the spatter on the stove from at least a month of pancakes. He should be a better housekeeper, he told himself; he was paying a low rent, a favor that the Stehlíks had granted to the school.

  “Please, you have telephone,” Mr. Stehlík announced.

  “Telephone? Upstairs?” Jacob answered, excitedly. He knew that Mr. Stehlík thought phone calls were expensive and should be brief, and it surprised him that Mr. Stehlík was so unhurried.

  “Your friend Mr. Luboš say, that tomorrow he cannot.”

  Nothing in Mr. Stehlík’s body language suggested a readiness to move from the spot, but Jacob asked, nonetheless, “Can I talk to him?”

  “No. He call in the morning.”

  “Oh.” Mr. Stehlík lacked the past tense, as Jacob had in Czech until recently. Luboš was not on the phone upstairs, and he was not going to meet Jacob under the clock tomorrow night for dinner. Probably Mr. Stehlík had made no effort to fetch Jacob when the call came through. Jacob wondered when Luboš had called; if Mr. Stehlík had not yet left the house, Jacob too had probably still been at home. It was as if Mr. Stehlík had robbed him of Luboš.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Please, I do not understand. Repeat?”

  “Do you mind if I call him back?” Jacob asked, aware that in his anger he was speaking more colloquially and less intelligibly. But the finger he pointed toward the ceiling conveyed his wish.

  “Mr. Jacob, can you telephone outside? There is telephone at the pub.”

  “Oh,” Jacob said. He made a perfunctory smile to disguise his disappointment.

  “Telephone upstairs is of me and of neighbor.” These lines, too, sounded carefully prepared, as if they were the real burden of the visit. “It is for business, but neighbor telephones all the time. Day and night. Is difficult.”

  “I understand. Of course.” Jacob was not on the phone more than thirty minutes a month, but he was in reach and the neighbor wasn’t. Wishing not to lose all rights to the phone, he asked if he might still receive short messages, like the one just left by Luboš.

  “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Stehlík, but Jacob doubted that he meant it. “And your family, when call from America, yes.”

  “Thank you,” Jacob answered.

  “Please,” he replied, and exited.

  Jacob opened the refrigerator and stared into it vacantly, with the false purposefulness that lingers for a few moments when a person of a solitary nature is released from the company of a strong personality. If Mr. Stehlík were to return, Jacob would seem to be planning for dinner. Slowly he came to see the refrigerator’s dull tin shelves for himself rather than through eyes loaned to Mr. Stehlík, and when he returned to himself, he found that he was admiring the row of jams and preserves he had collected in the past few months from stores all over the city: strawberry, gooseberry, apricot, currant, and lingonberry. It was nice to have a different one every time he made pancakes. But he wouldn’t make pancakes again tonight, he decided.

  Though it was tomorrow night’s date that was canceled, somehow the news left him feeling cut off from the world tonight, too; the evening ahead seemed long. He decided to try to call Luboš. The pub with the pay phone was across a concrete plaza from the mall of stores, in the direction from which he had just come.

  The neighbor’s collie barked furiously. Jacob took a lunging sidestep toward it, because he felt a viciousness in himself tonight, as fierce as the dog’s, and the animal paused for a moment, frightened into silence. But Jacob kept walking, and the dog realized that the challenge was empty—that the fence remained between them—and renewed his barking with even more force.

  At the pub, Jacob was told there was no phone. —Outside, a man advised him, and when Jacob walked back outside, he saw that he had walked right past the phone booth, a frail, slender structure with an orange-painted frame and sixteen panes of glass, most of them cracked. A narrow margin of grass had grown up around it, a little wildly, where the municipal lawnmower had evidently
not been able to reach. The grass had died with the coming of the cold weather, at about the height of a child.

  The apparatus inside was intact and took Jacob’s coin. The call went through; he heard the doubled buzzing that signaled that the phone was ringing in the house of Luboš’s friend. It rang for a long time. As he waited, he remembered a time when he was a boy and had called his best friend repeatedly, as an experiment, asking each time if his friend had picked up the phone on the ring or between rings, until the two of them determined that there was no connection between the ringing sound heard by the caller and the actual rings of the phone called.

  —Please, a voice answered, a standard but to Jacob’s ears somewhat officious way to answer the phone in Czech.

  —Good evening. Is Luboš there?

  —Who’s calling?

  —Jacob.

  —One moment.

  There was scuffling and scratching as the receiver was set down. In a short while the voice returned, now speaking English: “He is away. May I take message?”

  —I will call later, Jacob answered, insisting on Czech.

  “Do you have telephone?”

  —No longer, Jacob said. —I will call again.

  The booth’s glass gave some shelter from the wind, and Jacob lingered there after replacing the receiver. And suddenly it was all too much for him. He felt sad and misplaced, with the abrupt, overwhelming, dizzying sadness that comes over people in countries not their own, which has none of the richness of feeling that usually comes with sadness but is rather a kind of exhaustion. It hardly mattered about Luboš, he felt. It wasn’t really Luboš that he missed; it was still Daniel, as it had been before, as perhaps it would always be. As he thought of Daniel, the feelings and circumstances of Boston returned to him with unexpected intensity. He didn’t enjoy remembering them, but they seemed more powerful than he was, and more real than his surroundings. They seemed to establish a context for themselves in the night around him more solid than the rickety booth that he was, rather pointlessly, still standing in. He felt lightheaded, as if he were a little drunk. And like a drunk he became maudlin. That a person like Daniel had taken him up, however briefly, was the only remarkable thing that had ever happened to him. It was stupid of him to be here, so far away.