Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “Not bloody Czechoslovakia at any rate,” Thom said. “If I may ask another question, at the risk of bollixing everything up again: Are we to understand that the woman dies?”

  Henry shrugged, to indicate that he had left it up to the reader.

  “The story is kind of violent,” Jacob hazarded.

  “Mmm,” Henry agreed. A tight smile suggested a certain pride. It occurred to Jacob that Henry might enjoy their disconcertment. It might be an effect he had sought.

  “But I don’t know if the source of the violence is anger,” Jacob continued. He didn’t know that the source wasn’t anger, but he wanted there to be another explanation. He wanted to defend Henry from the evidence he had placed in the record against himself. It had been placed there as art not confession, Jacob reminded himself.

  “Do you like it at all?” Henry at last asked Jacob directly.

  A pause. “I do.” He thought he could safely answer in the same challenging spirit. “But it isn’t for me, is it. It’s kind of a joke on a reader like me.”

  “How so?”

  Jacob saw with relief that his point was general not personal, and he continued: “Kaspar was saying something to me about surrealism, where the surrealist pretends to take the side of the machine, to show that no human can ever really take the side of the machine. He shows it as if despite himself. He wants his intentions to be misunderstood, maybe even by himself. And there’s something like that here.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I mean that a reader like me wants a story, and you’re playing the game as if there are only sentences. And I’m going to look even harder for a story because of that.”

  “The story is like the machine,” Henry suggested.

  “No, it would be clever of you to argue that, because then you could hide your tracks even deeper. But no. The story is of you and milady and the landscape. And you want to convince us there is no story.”

  “And why should I try that?”

  “Because the story itself is the wall with the broken glass,” Jacob saw, as he was speaking. “It’s the story itself that cuts you and makes you bleed. I don’t know if any of what I’m saying is ‘true,’ of course.”

  “Which story, then?” Henry considered. “This one, or the one you think I’m really telling?”

  “This one, this one. This is the way you tell it.”

  “As if it cuts me up to tell it.”

  “And you cut it up. And yet it’s an ecstasy for you.”

  Carl objected: “He could have written a different story.”

  But Jacob insisted: “Any story that he tells this way, this is the story that he tells.”

  “And if he tells it conventionally,” Carl asked, in a skeptical tone, “only then is he free to tell something else?”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob somewhat retreated. “Maybe. Maybe a broken story is always about a writer’s relationship to story.”

  “I don’t buy that,” said Carl. “Everyone has a relationship to story.”

  “Then every story is about the writer’s relationship to story.”

  “Now how does that work.”

  “So you, for instance, aren’t showing us yours,” Jacob answered Carl. “That’s your relationship to story right now.”

  “You like to skate close to the edge, Mr. Putnam,” Carl said. Jacob liked hearing it.

  Henry returned to the discussion: “But if every story is about story, then every story must also be about something else, as well, something other than itself, or what are stories for?”

  Thom broke his silence: “That’s where milady comes in, I suspect.”

  “She’s the story,” Jacob declared.

  “‘The story’?” Henry echoed.

  “‘I love her.’ ‘She loves me.’ ‘I don’t love her.’ ‘She doesn’t love me.’”

  “Is that always the story?” Henry asked.

  “Almost always.”

  “And I’m against it,” he said, sounding out the truth of Jacob’s claim in his own voice.

  “You are aware of the confinement. Of the violence.”

  “But you’re leaving something out,” Carl broke in. “Because there is something episodic, something unattached, even in a story kind of story. Beneath story.”

  “The demon,” Jacob said, to his own surprise.

  “The demon?” Carl repeated.

  “The rogue,” Jacob said, trying again.

  “Oh, the rogue. But isn’t he a story, too?”

  “A wrecker of stories.”

  “But that’s just more story,” Carl pointed out.

  “Hang on a minute,” Henry broke in. “I quite like that, about the demon.”

  “I don’t know where that came from,” Jacob admitted.

  “He’s the one who’s never caught by a story,” Henry said, taking up the thread himself.

  “Or he’s always caught and he always escapes,” Jacob suggested. “Maybe he’s the one you were trying to write about.”

  “He might have been.”

  Carl interrupted by rising from the table to pour himself a glass of water. He rinsed his beer bottle first and left the water running while he set the bottle with a faint click on the floor of the pantry where they were collecting an array of empties. When he took up an empty glass and touched the tap to feel through it the temperature of the water, Jacob had the impression that he too could feel the cold of the metal on his fingertip, because he had touched it that way so many times himself.

  “It’s about being in love,” Carl said.

  Henry shrugged again, to allow the possibility.

  “Who are you in love with, Henry?” Carl continued.

  “Weren’t you listening?” Thom asked. “He’s in love with a woman in a castle surrounded by wolves.”

  “But I’m not to be walled up there,” Henry himself joked. He folded up his pages. “Well, thank you for this,” he said, and eyed each of them in turn. “For the interpretation.”

  * * *

  That weekend Jacob insisted on going to Vyšehrad, the old Czech castle grounds just south of the city’s downtown. He was to meet Annie and Melinda there, and at the last minute Carl accepted an invitation to come along.

  At the Vyšehrad stop, there were shadows before and after the subway’s posted name, where letters from its old name had long sheltered the metal beneath from dirt and weather. Once Jacob noticed the shadows, the word they formed became legible even beneath the letters of the new name; until last year, the station had honored Czechoslovakia’s first Communist president.

  “There they are,” Carl said, of their friends.

  Jacob hadn’t yet got his bearings. In a moment, though, he was able to follow Carl’s gaze. At the top of a flight of glassed-in stairs was Annie, a cream angora scarf knotted around her neck, a pine-green hat failing to contain her hair, and a scuffed canvas backpack, crammed full for the expedition, looped over one shoulder. Beside her, Melinda, less careful but more elegant, held in the grip of thin, bright red gloves a hat of white yarn with a pompom, a property of Annie’s that she was in the habit of borrowing. She seemed to be hesitating to put it on.

  They took turns exchanging kisses hello.

  “Is it this way?” Jacob asked. He had unfolded his blue city map, which these days he kept flat against his handkerchief in a back pocket. Since he had given up men he had taken up geography. He visited a new sight or a new neighborhood nearly every weekend. “Is this it?” he asked, pointing through the plate glass at a concrete landscape. “Did they pave it?”

  “This is the Palace of Culture, so-called,” Melinda said. “Vyšehrad is farther on. Shall we?”

  They stepped out onto the ungiving white plateau, which was angry with winter sun. “We’re high up,” Carl noticed.

  “On a cliff, I’d say,” Annie commented. A highway bridge of the same white concrete stretched north from the subway station and spanned a valley of villas and bungalows. They could see no way of descend
ing to the valley; the elevation seemed to confine them to the concrete plinth of the Palace of Culture. The palace itself was a bleak vault of pale marble and brown-tinted glass. It focused the wind, which pushed and shoved them as it blew past, buffeting the hollows of their ears with a sound like that of a luffing sail.

  “Is there culture? Should we go inside?” Jacob asked.

  “It was for party congresses, and now I believe trade shows and such like. Rafe dragged me along for a function once, I can’t remember what. I can’t say I recommend it.”

  “Rafe is returning tonight, isn’t he,” Annie said, reminded of the news by the mention of his name.

  “Oh? Mr. Stehlík just came back to our house,” Jacob said.

  “That’s the father?” Melinda inquired.

  “He yelled at us,” Carl volunteered.

  “He yelled at me,” Jacob corrected him.

  They came to the end of the white cement and tumbled off the corner of it into a regular Prague street of shops and family dwellings. The wind softened, and it became easier to talk.

  “What were your crimes?” asked Melinda.

  As they walked, Jacob described the bell and the string he had persuaded to install, and then described how Mr. Stehlík had stormed through Jacob’s bedroom and into Carl’s that morning; pointed a finger, crooked as if he couldn’t bear to straighten it, at the bell on Carl’s bedside table; and asked, “Mr. Jacob, what is it please?”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Je to jenom , a díra už tam byla.”

  “Darling, ‘’ is a bit much.”

  Jacob translated for Annie: “It’s only a tiny little bell, and the hole was already there.”

  “He shouldn’t have minded,” Annie loyally said, “if the hole was indeed already there.”

  “I think your speaking Czech made it worse,” Carl said.

  “He didn’t like it that we offered to pay him, either.”

  “You were offering to pay for what, exactly—indulgences?” Melinda asked. The vulgarity of their offer seemed to delight her.

  “We’re American,” said Carl. He made it seem unsporting to resist appearing crass.

  “Mr. Stehlík said he had waited ten years to get a phone,” Jacob concluded.

  They came to a ruined stone gate, patched on top with a red chalet roof. It marked the outer limits of the castle grounds, and though they could have walked through abreast, they walked through in single file, the women preceding. On the other side, low grassy banks sheltered the road, which felt less like a road than a path. As the road curved, a finger of sun touched them, though too lightly to bring much warmth. There didn’t seem to be any groundskeepers, perhaps because it was midwinter. There was no sign of any other visitors, either.

  “It’s a gorilla problem,” Carl ventured.

  “Is that an American term?” Melinda asked.

  “It’s a term of my own devising,” he said. “It’s when an argument isn’t rational because it’s really about deciding who’s the top gorilla.”

  “Jacob was challenging the man’s authority,” Melinda said, as she followed the line of thought.

  “Jacob’s mistake is to think about the problem, when he should be thinking about the gorilla.”

  “Then can you use the phone at all any more?” Annie asked.

  “Not while Mr. Stehlík is in town, I don’t think,” Jacob said.

  “Shame,” Annie said.

  They came to a second gate. This one was a sort of grand façade set across the road, with no building behind it. Set in the façade above the passageway were three relief cartouches, two of them apparently empty. “Is that all there is to it?” Melinda asked of the structure, skeptically. Beyond the gate, the sloping banks that channeled the road were taller, and in the shade of them she shivered. “Tell me again, why is it we’re here?”

  Wind slowly bent the bare, fine-fingered trees above them and fluttered a short-trimmed, chartreuse lawn. “It’s part of my quest,” Jacob answered.

  “Would you take my scarf,” Carl suddenly said to Melinda, irony absent from his voice.

  “Oh, please,” Melinda refused.

  “I don’t need it,” he said, unwinding it.

  “I’m a married woman, more or less. I can’t go about borrowing men’s scarves.”

  “My nana knitted it,” Carl assured her. “Your nose is as red as a button.”

  “How awful,” she said, covering her nose. “In that case, then.”

  The scarf was long and loosely woven, mostly grays and whites, but sprinkled with red and royal purple. Carl made as if to wrap it around Melinda by circling her, but she tugged it out of his hands—“I won’t if it’s to be my winding sheet”—and allowed it to drape her only loosely, so that the line of her neck was still visible.

  “It is fetching,” Annie said. “Will your nana knit me one, do you think?”

  “It’s dashing,” Carl declared.

  “Oh, well, ‘dashing,’” Melinda half mocked.

  Carl’s throat was left open to the air, and the women noticed a pendant he wore, which Jacob had often noticed but had never asked about. “Is there a figure on it?” Melinda asked.

  “Saint Christopher. The patron saint of travelers.” He drew it out from beneath his shirt. It was made of a dull, light metal, a cheap alloy, and it was about the size of a nickel.

  “Was it given you?”

  “I picked it up in Paris. In a religious shop near the Luxembourg Garden.”

  “I thought you might have won it in some way,” Melinda explained. While she fingered it, he stood very still.

  “Like a medal,” he suggested.

  “Yes. Or as a love token,” she said, dropping it.

  The openness of the flirtation was their permission. Melinda seemed to enter into Carl’s game with perfect naturalness—to catch his way of handling feelings with doubled irony. Maybe it had always been her way, too. Jacob watched her turn away and hike ahead as if she had no interest in standing close to Carl any longer than she already had, no interest in tucking back into the neck of his shirt the pendant that he was now tucking back in himself, the metal once more against his skin. Jacob was sure that nothing was going to happen between Carl and Melinda—he was as convinced of that as he was that something sweet and painful now attached them. He wouldn’t have been very good at talking about his impression. If asked, he might have said he “felt bad for them,” but he would have sensed, in saying this, that the formulation was wrong or at least inadequate, because in another way he felt good for them; he was glad they felt alive, as they must have felt if in fact they felt anything like what he imagined. Of course there was no need to talk about it—no need for the two of them or for anyone else—no need that couldn’t be put off. It was like what he had said to Henry in their writer’s group. There was such a thing as a resistance to story. There was even a pleasure in resisting it, a somewhat violent pleasure—and then there was the pleasure of having the two of them near him, the pleasure he took in their beauty, as his friends, which was like a wealth he shared in, without any responsibility for it.

  They passed a simple round building of white irregular stone. A belfry just as simple, round, and white rose from the center of its roof.

  “Are we here because of the radio, by any chance?” Melinda asked. “It’s just that there isn’t that much to see.”

  “The radio?”

  “You hear the tune on the radio every morning, at least I do.”

  “I don’t have a radio,” Jacob said.

  “Well, then, you would do, if you did have one. I believe they play it every hour on the hour.”

  “No radio,” said Annie thoughtfully. “I quite depend on mine.”

  “No radio, no telephone,” Melinda observed. “No mod cons whatsoever in , are there.”

  “We have a hamster,” Jacob said.

  “Not traditionally considered an amenity.”

  “But what is it they play on the radio?” Jaco
b asked.

  “‘Vyšehrad,’ darling. The little harp number.”

  “By Smetana.”

  “Well yes. It’s quite pretty. You know, the plinking one. Arpeggios.” She gestured instead of trying to sing them.

  “Oh, is that what it is?” said Annie.

  “A sentimental favorite. And I know that Mr. Putnam has a weakness for sentiment.”

  Carl reported that there were more buildings ahead.

  “I didn’t say there was nothing here,” Melinda said. “It’s just that most of it was knocked down long ago.”

  “It’s the Stalin monument of the fourteenth century,” said Carl.

  “Always the bonmoty with this one,” Melinda appreciated.

  They came to a sort of plaza of dead grass and frozen winter mud, where they halted. At the far end was a dark, two-spired church and beside it, to the right, a walled yard they knew to be a cemetery. “I believe Smetana himself is in there,” Melinda hazarded. To their left, a squat yellow building was labeled as a museum, but its grille was locked and the lights were off. In the matter of interpretation, they were left to their own devices. Scattered in the fields were a few pieces of statuary, for the most part in the decorative, conservative style of monuments from the First Republic, except for one statue close to them, which appeared strangely modern: three rounded pillars rose from the earth and leaned loosely together. The pillars looked from a distance like concrete but on nearer inspection they proved to be stone.

  “We’re asked to believe that these are from the Neolithic,” Melinda said, interpreting a plaque.

  Jacob also translated. “It says the three stones were unburied in the first decade of the twentieth century.”

  “And buried just two months before that, no doubt,” Melinda joked.

  “But what are they?” Annie asked.

  “An omphalos, probably,” said Jacob.

  “A what, dear?” Melinda asked.

  “A bellybutton of the world.”

  “I didn’t know it had one.”

  “There was one in ancient Greece, I think. To mark the center.”