Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  After the morning sun, the upstairs hallway of the hostel seemed dim and its air stale, like an invalid’s room. Jacob’s footfalls were involuntarily quieted by the carpet. He didn’t think Annie would still be asleep, and he knocked on her door, which he came to before his own.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” he heard her ask from within, in a timid voice. He would have pictured an old woman if he hadn’t known her.

  “It’s me. It’s Jacob.”

  He heard the deadbolt thrown, and the doorknob turned, but she didn’t unlatch the small chain at eye level until she saw him. “Jeez, you frightened me. I didn’t know who it was.”

  “Who did you think?”

  She wandered back into the small room, searching among her unpacked clothes and makeup and open, facedown books and the washed-out containers from their train-board lunch for the ashtray where she had set her cigarette. “I had no idea, really. You weren’t in when I knocked a short while ago, so I didn’t think it could be you.”

  “I’m just getting in.”

  “So I gather.” She bounced gently down on the bed beside her suitcase and squinted at him through the smoke. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yes, I can see that you are, now.”

  He wanted to tell her about it, but she wanted breakfast first. They found a place on the next street and ordered eggs and tea. He narrated his adventure while they ate.

  “How much is it in crowns, do you think?” Annie asked when the bill came.

  Jacob had to figure it into dollars first, before he could answer. It was about three days’ salary.

  “It’s on me,” he volunteered. “I happen to have the deutschmarks.”

  “You’ll need them soon enough. Aren’t you going to buy a pair of blue jeans?”

  “They aren’t my deutschmarks. Markus gave them to me for cab fare, and I didn’t use them all.”

  “Well, I won’t stop you if you want to disembarrass yourself of them.”

  “There’s only change left,” Jacob assured her, and showed it to her in his palm.

  She hadn’t finished her tea, and they were both reluctant to start the business part of their day, asking for work in language schools, so they sat a little longer.

  “Are you still seeing your Czech friend?” Annie asked, to make conversation.

  “He stood me up the other day.”

  “Oh?” She clinked a spoon idly in her cup. “Perhaps he’s a little afraid of you.”

  “No, no.”

  “You needn’t become alarmed. I’m not saying he’s afraid of anything you might do.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said, more quietly, thinking she meant he was an outsider, who would eventually leave. “You haven’t told me anything about your evening,” he continued, to change the subject.

  “Oh, haven’t I?” she said. “It was fine, as you Americans say. ‘Fine.’”

  “That’s good,” Jacob responded, but he was not so inattentive as to believe her. “Where should we go first?” he asked. “There are a couple of language schools over on the Ku’damm.”

  “Oh, are there?” she echoed, uncertainly. Jacob had noticed the addresses on billboards the night before, on his way to Kreuzberg. They hadn’t otherwise prepared at all. In Prague Jacob hadn’t needed to. On his third day in the city, frustrated by a broken pay phone on the street, he had stepped into an office building to ask where he could find a phone that worked. The building’s porter had listened to him ask his question in English and in French, and had then directed him by gestures to the third floor, where, instead of a pay phone, Jacob had found the municipal office for foreign language instruction. The porter had thought Jacob had known where he was. Within an hour, he had signed a contract for a year’s employment.

  “I don’t know as I’m up for it, Jacob, I’m sorry,” Annie said.

  “We have to try, at least,” he insisted, thinking with confidence how easy it had been in Prague. “Today’s our only weekday. The worst they can do is say no, and if they do we’ll just ask which of their competitors has low standards and might take us.”

  “It isn’t that.” She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, I’m a right eejit.”

  Now she was crying but working to stop herself. “What is an eejit, anyway,” he asked. “Is it like a git?”

  “You know, an eejit. A person who does a thing everyone knows he shouldn’t do, but everyone knows he will do, anyway.” In the act of explaining, her composure began to come back to her.

  “Like an idiot.”

  “It’s not as cold as that.” He waited; she drank a little of her tea. “So I went to the bar, to meet my friends,” she continued. “And there was this man, whom I used to be with. I didn’t think he’d be there, or I wouldn’t have gone. An awfully fine man. He was on the stuff, we all were, a little, when I was here before. Which made it rather carefree.”

  “And you had some last night.”

  “What do you take me for, Jacob? I may be an eejit, but I’m not bloody stupid.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t,” she said. “But that’s just it, as it happens. If I came back, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t, in the end. Which would spoil it. The memory isn’t all bad, you see. But it’s the having left that keeps it from being all bad, if you understand what I’m saying.”

  She seemed fragile and brave. “Let’s not move to Berlin, then,” he said. “It was you who brought me here.”

  “I didn’t see my way, then.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. But he wondered if he really could give up what he had caught a glimpse of.

  “You haven’t fallen in love, have you.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I wanted to see, is all.”

  He continued for a while to assure her that he didn’t want to stay, but in the end they decided he might as well take a look at the language schools. There was no harm in his exploration.

  * * *

  The interviewers were concerned that he couldn’t speak German. They were disappointed that he had no training. They doubted that they could help him obtain a work permit.

  “There’ll be something for you, if you want it,” Annie said, gamely. “Are you willing to wait tables and such like? I could ask my friends. They’re bound to know of something.”

  “How can I wait tables in English? No, don’t ask them yet.” He didn’t think she much wanted to see her friends again so soon, and he was hoping that Markus would have a suggestion. He and Markus had arranged a date for Saturday night.

  It was a relief to fall into tourism and shopping until then. A ruined, red-brick church tower seemed to be the center of the city. The high streets were pulled closer to it as they approached, as if by a kind of magnetism. The plaza where the tower stood was ringed by glassy stores, some of a great height, which seemed to have encouraged one another, with glances and nudges, to come as close as they dared to the old ogre, still standing despite an ugly hole in her head, and then, because the ogre didn’t topple but continued monotonously to stand, they had lost interest in her and had begun to amuse themselves instead with one another, with gossip and barter.

  Jacob and Annie didn’t go inside the tower because there was an admission fee. “When you live here, you just piss money away,” Annie observed. “But it isn’t the same if you’re going back to Prague.” As Friday turned into Saturday, it became clear that they couldn’t really afford anything. Everything was an extravagance, if calculated in crowns, and the business of filling their time with leisure—the purchases of a snack, a bus ticket, a postcard—took on an unreal character, as if they were paying a visit at great expense to selves no longer their own, to selves that they would not really be able to return to until they had given up on Prague for good, whenever that was. To make these selves speak from exile they had to spill money recklessly, like Odysseus pouring blood into a hole in the ground in the underworld. Whenever they stopped spending, they
seemed to be walking in a fairy city where they were invisible, or looking through a grandparent’s pair of eyeglasses, too strong, at a world strenuously sharp and distant.

  To save the cost of the ticket, they didn’t enter Checkpoint Charlie but merely walked along the Wall, until Brandenburg Gate. The souvenirs that were sold on blankets here were for the most part the same ones sold in Prague: matryoshky, badges, and Russian military coats and hats. In the discount clothing stores, where Jacob could almost afford the jeans, they recognized the other customers as having also come from the East: the men’s long whiskers and the coarse henna in the women’s hair gave them away. A small band of Slavic men brushed past Jacob as he was waiting for a changing room, and he had to look after them to make sure that the tallest wasn’t Luboš, as for a moment he had seemed to be.

  “That’s bad luck,” Annie said, when he told her.

  He didn’t buy the jeans.

  He and Annie had spent Friday night together, but Markus had warned Jacob that the bar that he wanted to take him to strictly refused to admit women.

  “That hardly sounds European,” Annie commented, “but on the other hand there is something very German about it, isn’t there.”

  “Markus said there must be some men who couldn’t be themselves if there were women in the bar.”

  “Well, it isn’t as if one would want to go to such a place. I’m going to have that lovely escarole soup again, at the place near the hostel.”

  And Jacob, it turned out, was to have no dinner at all. Another man was drinking with Markus when Jacob arrived, a tall man with a wounded look named Ernst. The two Germans had already eaten their dinner elsewhere. Markus suggested vaguely that if Jacob were hungry, the bar they were in might serve hamburgers, but he seemed not to notice when Jacob failed to follow the suggestion up. Ernst made no effort to speak English, though he seemed to understand it. To Jacob’s surprise, he also gave no sign that he intended to leave. In fact, when he wasn’t glaring at Jacob, he refused to look at him, as if Jacob were the interloper, not he. At a loss, Jacob prattled vacantly about his search for blue jeans. From time to time he looked into Markus’s eyes, in search of the welcome he had been looking forward to, but it was either veiled or absent.

  At last Ernst left the table for the men’s room, and Markus explained the situation. An hour before Jacob arrived, Ernst had revealed that he was in love with Markus. It would perhaps be better if Markus saw Jacob another time.

  “But I’m leaving tomorrow,” Jacob said. “I don’t know if I’m coming back. I wasn’t able to find a job.”

  “That’s a pity,” Markus said formally. And then, as if he did take pity on Jacob, lust flared up in his eyes for a moment, though it was quickly banked. He didn’t offer to help. There wasn’t time to go into such a subject before Ernst returned to the table.

  “Why did you make a date with both of us?” Jacob asked. He almost felt sorry for Markus as he asked the question, as if Markus had trapped himself accidentally in a social obligation. Perhaps Jacob could think of a way to get him out of it.

  “I had not foreseen that Ernst would tell me such news. You and I have just met. You must be reasonable.”

  It was when he was told to be reasonable that Jacob realized he had been betrayed. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure exactly what he didn’t believe.

  “Would you like money for a cab?” The offer was almost surreptitious, because Ernst was in sight again.

  “No.” Jacob made an effort to smile at Ernst, so as not to lose face. Let Ernst be the sullen one. A part of Jacob admired Markus for having arranged to be the only one of the three free of the worry that he might be left on the shelf. Maybe that was what he didn’t believe: that Markus had come into such an arrangement accidentally.

  He drank the rest of his deutschmarks in another bar and cried childishly as he walked back to the hostel. He felt as if he were being taught a lesson. In the morning he woke up looking forward to Prague. In the train he told Annie the story of his displacement lightheartedly, sensing, as he told it, that his enjoyment of her sympathy was already greater than the wound he had received.

  * * *

  To Jacob, as the train descended into the valley that held Prague, the sky seemed to be upholstered in gray silk. Or perhaps, he thought, his head against the glass of the window, it was a coat of very fine mail. The sky was one of the things he was up against in Prague. It was one of the city’s weapons.

  Moving to Berlin would have been like choosing the easy essay question on a final exam, the one the professor puts there for the students who would otherwise flounder. Jacob wasn’t supposed to be one of those students. The story in Berlin was evident: communism had ceased to struggle, and capitalism hadn’t, and now the still-living beast was swallowing the dead one in dazed, erratic gulps, like a boa constrictor nearly demoralized by the size of the meal it had embarked on. It was harder to know what was happening in Prague, because it wasn’t being swallowed. Capitalism still hadn’t arrived; communism hadn’t yet altogether departed. In Prague, therefore, it had to have been a third force that set the story in motion. Or a third system, since those two weren’t simply forces.

  Annie interrupted his thoughts: “I don’t suppose we need tell them why we changed our minds.”

  “They won’t need a reason, so long as we’re coming back.”

  “We’ll just tell them how boundlessly attractive they are.” The train was curving slowly around a bend in the Vltava. The river was black and dull, like deeply tarnished silver. “I am glad it didn’t work out for you with your man in Berlin,” she added. “It is selfish of me, but I am.”

  “It was an adventure,” he said neutrally. He was beginning to regret the episode. A picture of Luboš came into his mind, and he felt a pang. He told himself he hadn’t lost anything. It would be unfair to reproach himself for having slept with someone else; Luboš had all but said that he had other lovers. But he still felt that he had cheated, somehow. It was in trying to sort out this sense of betrayal that he began to have an inkling of the mission he had set for himself in Prague. He had to feel his way toward it at first. It was like trying to find something set down absentmindedly in the dark. When he did put a conscious hand on it, it seemed so ridiculous that he nearly drew his hand back. It seemed youthful and foolish. But perhaps it had only become ridiculous because he had abandoned it. Perhaps his abandonment, however temporary or optative, had damaged it. He had carried it without seeing it, before, and now he not only saw it but also the crack in it. He wasn’t sure he could take it up again earnestly; he wasn’t sure he could work himself back into it—see it again from the inside, now that he had seen the outside. To find the spirit of change—was that it?—after the change had happened. It was like a plan to look for a kind of bird that was known to have already flown south. And what’s more, he had thought love would bring him this discovery. It didn’t make much sense.

  But then, abruptly, he found himself inside the idea again—and on the train, too, and looking out the window at the gray sky and black water. He would find it, if he didn’t give up. The shadow at least was still here. He would have to find a way to be patient.

  * * *

  When Jacob returned to his rooms, he found no note in loopy script waiting on the kitchen table; Luboš had not called. He wound up his Russian-manufacture alarm clock—to set it ticking seemed an emblem of his return to life here—and curled up childishly on the sofa under a red fireproof blanket, which he had bought downtown for a hundred and fifty crowns a few weeks before the Berlin trip, at a department store named for the month of May. But the comforts failed him. That night, from the pay phone near the pub, he called the number Luboš had given him but learned nothing from the man who answered. When Friday came, he went to T-Club.

  Ivan must have recognized Jacob’s unwillingness to struggle, because he admitted him after only half an hour.

  “I forgot your cassette,” Jacob said, as he sat down n
ext to Ota.

  “Is okay, my friend.” Tonight Ota was wearing a lime-green Oxford shirt, which called out what was sallow in his features. “‘Some day,’ as the Americans say instead of good-bye.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “That is what they say to me. But perhaps they do not say it to everyone.” He pulled an elbow behind his head with one hand, so the other could scratch between his shoulder blades. There were shadows under his eyes.

  “It’s as if I never went away,” Jacob said, looking over the crowd. “I wonder if it will always be this way.”

  “Oh yes, everyone is always here,” Ota agreed, inattentively.

  “Not everyone. I don’t see your friend Milo.”

  “Do you like Milo?” he asked, and then he shrugged. “He is a good boy, and so I do not know where he is tonight.” He let his head loll to one side, like a puppet whose string has been dropped. “And where were you, that you went away?”