Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

“I don’t know what I am in America.” There was a murmur as the remark was translated.

  “We, neither,” Pavel put in, in his deeper voice. “We do not know what we are, in the new Czechoslovakia.”

  “I thought you were chemists.”

  “We are chemists now,” said Pavel. “But the future…?” He spread his hands.

  “We are researchers,” one of them volunteered. “It is not business.”

  The room fell silent for a few moments. They had come to the lesson to distract themselves from the uncertainty in their lives, but the uncertainty was present here, too.

  “And how long do you stay?” Bohumil asked, politely.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Until we learn English,” Bohumil decided for him, to the group’s approval.

  * * *

  When Jacob’s homeward tram paused at the metalworks, he noticed new graffiti on the corrugated siding that hid the factory from the street. He looked into his French-Czech dictionary for the words he didn’t know: they turned out to be the words for “Christmas” and “oranges.” Last week oranges had appeared in the ovoce a zelenina near the Stehlíks’ for the first time since his arrival, shrink-wrapped in groups of four on white Styrofoam trays. The label had said they were from Syria. He had bought a package and had eaten the fruit eagerly. Two days later, he had returned and bought more. He had felt confident about his greed for them, as if he were setting the Czechs an example. He tried to assemble the words in the graffiti into a translation. Until now, all the political graffiti that he had seen had been left over from the November revolution. It had referred to Havel and to Civic Forum, the movement that had put Havel in the castle, and there hadn’t been much. Graffiti was one of the things he had come too late for.

  OUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: ORANGES FOR SIXTY CROWNS, the line of graffiti read. THANKS, MR. KLAUS! When Jacob had bought his oranges, he hadn’t noticed the price, and it took him a moment to understand that the line was ironic. Klaus was the finance minister, and he was beginning to let things cost their true price. Their free price. Had Communists painted the graffiti? The only thing the oranges had put into Jacob’s head when he ate them was the hope that there might soon be bananas, which he could hardly remember the taste of. He pictured Communist strategists sitting around a table—a table like the one where he had just been teaching the chemists English—conspiring. Capitalism—the presence of oranges, at any price—was still fragile here. There had to be sacrifices, Jacob thought. The high prices were temporary, and in time economic growth would reward everyone. Of course it wasn’t Jacob who was making the sacrifices. He found himself wondering where the oranges used to come from. Maybe Cuba had sent them, at Warsaw Pact prices. There couldn’t have been very many, in that case. He would give Václav some when he got back. A part of him thought: There may be Czech children who can’t afford to eat oranges for lunch this winter, and here I am planning to feed one to a hamster. Only a corner of a segment, though. It was the first time Jacob had been away from him for so long—for seven hours, he counted. He had left the cardboard tube of a toilet paper roll in his cage in case he wanted something to gnaw on or climb.

  By the time Jacob reached his apartment, the sun had set. The light above the oven was the only one he had left on. The salt dish for Václav’s water had spilled, and Václav wasn’t visible. On end in a corner, the toilet paper tube came within a few inches of the cage’s rim. Jacob looked down it and saw nothing. The hamster must have scaled the roll and hopped out. Jacob went still and held his breath.

  After a few minutes, he heard Václav under the wardrobe in the bedroom, chewing. He got on his hands and knees and tried to tempt him with a bit of dry rohlík, but the animal was timid, so Jacob poked a broom handle under the wardrobe and then grabbed him as he ran out. He worried that Václav might have eaten poison, and he sat talking with him for a while afterward, admonishingly. He tried to share the promised orange, but the hamster was too rattled to eat.

  —Václav escaped, but I caught him, Jacob told , when she knocked soon after. —With my own hands.

  —Clever thing.

  —Who? I or he?

  —Both? Excuse me, please, but I must count the windows. She covered her face with one hand and shook her head beneath it. —Is here the census. Do you understand? With a notebook and many questions. It is horrible.

  —Did you tell him I’m here?

  —You? No.

  —But you have to.

  —I think, that no.

  —But yes. A census must count everyone. Even Americans. Please ask him.

  —You’re so eager, she marveled. —But first I have to count the windows.

  After Jacob’s kitchen and bedroom, opened a door beside his wardrobe—unlocked but never tried by Jacob—into unused rooms that continued the ground floor. “,” she said, looking down in dismay. She stepped carefully in, among a sofa that matched the one that Jacob slept on, a table-mounted sewing machine with a cast-iron foot treadle, two veneer-and-plywood wardrobes, a pillar of linoleum tiles whose pattern matched those in the Stehlíks’ upstairs kitchen, skis, ski boots, a green woman’s bicycle with flat tires, a tea set whose cups were stacked crazily, black plastic bags stuffed with cloth of some kind, rolls of carpet, a disconnected water heater, and, leaning against a wall, in a glassless frame, a poster of a shirtless man holding a baby against his chest. Though uninvited, Jacob followed in. —This is frightful, she commented. —Our shame!

  She proceeded into another room, and then, turning a corner, yet another, both as cluttered as the first.

  —Why aren’t the rooms open? Jacob asked.

  —When the grandparents lived here, it was not so.

  —If I had a friend…, Jacob began.

  —You must ask Father, cut him off. They had walked a C-shape and now were coming out into the stairwell, through a door opposite the entrance to Jacob’s apartment. —On the ground floor, six windows.

  —And seven doors.

  —Doors don’t interest him.

  Jacob walked back into his apartment. In his bedroom he shut the door to the unused rooms. He would no longer be able to feel that the room he slept in was the last one at the far, snug end of a cave. He already had the sense of sharing the space. Sharing it with Carl, he hoped. He would be able to show him everything. Carl wouldn’t even know how to validate his ticket on the tram—how to slip it into the metal device, the size of a fist, that was mounted on a pole in the center of the car and how to pull so that a distinctive pattern was punched into the ticket’s numbered, tic-tac-toe-like grid. Now that Jacob had a pass, he rarely used the tickets. But sometimes he bought a handful to get him through the first few days of the month, before he got the new month’s sticker. They were more satisfying, somehow, in their triviality and multiplicity, and because of the ritual of punching them. He used them as bookmarks and forgot to throw them away. The only time he had been checked on a tram, the revizor had patiently held half a dozen up to the light before finding the one ticket punched in a pattern that corresponded to the car and the day that they were in.

  —You are right, conceded, upon returning. Her face was pink from having gone up and down the stairs.

  —Excellent!

  In her manner she played up the impression that she begrudged him the official recognition. —First name, sir?

  He spelled it out for her. “Jay,” he called.

  “Yuh,” she echoed.

  “Ay.”

  “Ah.”

  “See.”

  “Tsuh.”

  And so on. She took down his family name, year of birth, and country of origin.

  —This is good, Jacob said. —Now I will be Czech!

  —I think, that no.

  —But yes!

  “Yah-tsop Poot-nahm,” intoned as she rose from her chair, pronouncing his name in strict accordance with the laws of Czech phonics, —you will never be Czech!

  * * *

  “What if I were your half brothe
r,” Carl suggested, as they planned by phone for his arrival.

  “But we’re the same age.”

  “I look older, I think.”

  “She had a very dramatic life, our mother,” Jacob objected.

  “Or father. In that case the age thing wouldn’t be as much of a problem.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I could be your stepbrother.”

  “He only heard you on the phone a couple of times. And won’t care.”

  “So we’re just friends. We’re having the conversation where you tell me we’re just friends.”

  “As I recall we already had that conversation. I’ll say you’re willing to pay as much as I’m paying. Eight hundred crowns a month.”

  “What is that, thirty dollars? My god. We’re robbing them.”

  “You’ll have your own room and your own window. But you’ll share my bathroom and kitchen.”

  “My own window!”

  “It’s the equivalent of a week’s salary,” Jacob said, with some asperity. “It’s not free.”

  * * *

  Annie’s mother bought her a ticket home for the holidays. The day before she flew, she and Jacob took the tram to his place after work. At Palmovka, where they had to transfer, she insisted on stopping in at a cukrárna. “You don’t mind, do you? I stop in almost every day, and I’d like to wish them a happy Christmas.”

  In the store window, behind smudged glass and in front of a half curtain of polyester lace, lay white trays of cookies, rectangular-sliced cakes, and pastries. A motherly woman in a hairnet served behind the counter, placing on a cardboard square the sweets that each customer ordered. “A co dál?” she prompted, as soon as a customer made an indication. “A co dál?” And what further? When a customer said that that was all, the woman tore a length of light gray paper off a roll and wrapped the cardboard and the sweets in it, twisting shut two corners on top. Two pretty teenage girls, also in hairnets, assisted her, one at the cash register, the other ferrying new trays to the counter from a room in back.

  “I’m partial to the amber biscuits there, the ones on the tray to the right. I don’t know what’s in them. Butter, I suppose.”

  “They look dry.”

  “Do you think so? I quite fancy them.”

  When they arrived at the head of the line, the woman greeted Annie warmly.

  “Dobrý den!” Annie replied, girlishly. She pointed at the cookies she wanted and asked for three, please, in Czech. —And I want…, she continued, still in Czech, but then broke off. “How do you say it, Jacob? My friend will say it for me. Moment,” she pleaded. “Va-something, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want to say?”

  “Happy Christmas.”

  “ vá veselé vánoce a rok,” Jacob supplied.

  “You can’t be serious,” Annie said.

  “I said for New Year’s, too.”

  The woman returned the wishes directly to Annie.

  “Tomorrow I’m going home,” Annie explained. “.”

  The woman smiled regretfully.

  “Oh, do tell her though that I’m coming back.”

  Jacob ordered some meringue cookies for himself.

  “They aren’t her daughters,” Annie commented as they walked to the eastbound tram stop. “I asked.”

  A tram came quickly, its bell trilling as it stopped for them. They took seats in the back. It was thought rude to put a bag on a seat, even if a tram was mostly empty, so they put theirs between their feet and held their wrapped cookies in their laps.

  The tram pulled away, along the white gray of the road and under the dark gray of the sky. Lower clouds were moving across a field of upper ones, like fingerprints on the glass of a window being raised. The tram passed into the factory district, and Jacob found himself trying to look at the ugly roadside walls of metal and cement through Annie’s eyes. Soon he would be trying to look at them through Carl’s.

  “Ehm,” she began, “is he very small then?”

  “You can close your hand around him. Or I can.”

  “You have quite large hands, don’t you. Mine are dainty. Ladylike, you see. So he isn’t at all like a rat.”

  “Not at all.”

  “No tail, for instance. I’m quite fond of animals generally, mind. But not a rat.”

  They were passing a factory of timepieces, and Jacob pointed out a triangular mosaic of oversize clock faces on its façade, underneath the company name in stocky lettering.

  “I think I’d rather you didn’t hand him to me or anything,” she pursued. “Is that all right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I did want to see you. I haven’t seen so much of you lately.”

  “I stopped seeing Luboš.”

  “Oh? I thought perhaps you might have done.” When he didn’t say more, she asked, “Are you looking forward to the arrival of your friend?”

  “He’s just a friend.”

  “Oh, a friend,” she echoed.

  “He’s straight.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t. Will I like him? Is he going to shake my hand in a hearty manner?”

  “Hail fellow well met.”

  “Yes, that’s what you call it. Making ‘deals’ and such like.”

  “No, he isn’t like that. You’ll like him.”

  “I expect I will. I expect one likes your friends.”

  “Look,” Jacob said. They were passing the one entrance to the locomotive factory where you could catch a glimpse of it through the gates. A wet road twisted downhill into a huddle of soot-stained buildings, and three chimneys handed milky smoke into the lowest layer of cloud. After the monotony of the walls that hid the factory, the view was startling, as if one had hiked over a mountain ridge and discovered a city in the next valley. The tram didn’t stop, and so the sight was taken away as quickly as it had been given.

  “It isn’t any wonder you fell sick with that next door to you.”

  “It’s like looking at the nineteen thirties,” Jacob said.

  “A spot of nineteen thirties in a landscape of nineteen forties.”

  They found Václav safely imprisoned. He hid when their shadows fell on him, but Jacob put his hand into the cage with some seed, and the animal emerged and began to stuff the food into the pockets of his mouth.

  “It’s not like you,” Annie said.

  “The hamster?”

  “How will you take him back to the States? Not like you not to plan for that, I mean.”

  “He can fit in a cigarette pack. But it’s a long way off.”

  “He’s quite lovely.” She bent over, her hands folded between her legs, to study him. “An absurd name. I think I will just put my hand in and try to touch him, perhaps, if you don’t mind. You don’t think he’ll bite, do you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He doesn’t seem the sort.”

  She held her hand beside the creature and talked to it in a high voice as if it were a kitten. It let her stroke its back a few times, then made a few rabbitlike hops to the protection of its pile of shredded paper.

  “It has a lovely soft coat,” she said, holding the hand that had touched it in her other hand. “You won’t mind if I wash my hands, though? You won’t be offended?”

  They brewed tea. Though it was only late afternoon, the light was beginning to fail, and Jacob turned on the small chandelier over his kitchen table.

  “I can’t stand that everyone is leaving,” he said. Melinda was driving Rafe to London, where he was to meet her mother. Thom was returning to Edinburgh by a series of trains and the ferry. Henry was taking a bus to Spain to see a three-year-old daughter whom none of them had known that he had, as well as the ex-girlfriend who had borne her, with whom he was still on friendly terms.

  “We’ll be back soon enough,” Annie assured him.

  “The Stehlíks have invited me upstairs for the day itself. Which is the eve, here.”

  “Your friend isn’t coming until after, I take it.”


  “No.”

  “It will be different when he does come. One is quite cozy at the , with Thom just down the hall. Though I see less of him now he has Jana. He is useless, really, as a cook, but he is willing to do the washing up.”

  “I guess it will be different.” There was a kind of attention exchanged between people when they lived together, and he expected that with Carl there would be a lightness to it, and even a tenderness. The conversation would draw Jacob out of himself. “I’m not in love with him.”

  “Of course not,” Annie said, thinking in her case of Thom.

  “The most I ever said to myself was that I wished I had a lover like him.”

  Because their memory of the sun was fresh, the light from the bulbs of the chandelier seemed faint and dim, and in such a light it seemed safe to talk. “Sometimes,” Jacob volunteered, “when I’m here alone, it’s as if there isn’t anything in my head at all.”

  “Yes?” she said. She had been warming her hands around her cup, and now she pressed them against her cheeks. “Do you know that sounds a bit peculiar.”

  “I just lie in bed and watch the sun move across the blanket. Not impatiently.”

  “You’d like to be a writer as well, wouldn’t you?”

  “As well?”

  “Henry fancies himself a writer, but I don’t know as he does any writing.”

  “What about you?” Jacob asked.

  “I mean to, but the days go by, don’t they. Your saying so made me think of it.”

  “I keep thinking I’ll write something about my friend.”

  “Which friend would that be?”

  “The one who…”

  “Oh yes. Would you like to come to Dublin with me, by the way? It’ll be a fine time.”

  “What would I do with Václav?”

  “We get along quite well, my mother and I. I know it’s usual for people to row with their mothers, but she and I never do. She’s a very tolerant person.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not worried. It is an offer, if you like.”

  Her concern embarrassed him, and he wondered what had prompted him to mention his moments of idleness. They weren’t a source of anxiety; they were somehow pure. Maybe he was afraid of losing them. He decided to try to write something while his friends were away. That would be a good use of the time, he thought. In the event, however, he didn’t write a word.