Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  To mark the place, Jacob continued to himself, where spirit came into the world. A kind of scar. Was this it? he wondered. Was this as close as he would come? He would have come sooner, if he had known about it. He realized his heart was racing, but he was afraid his excitement would seem ridiculous if he tried to explain it to his friends.

  “I don’t much care for it,” Annie said. “Druids and such.”

  “Why not?” Jacob asked.

  “I can’t say exactly. It’s a bit doubtful, though, isn’t it, worshiping trees and rocks.”

  “Do we know that’s what they did?”

  “We don’t know anything, really, do we. All those years and years, and rocks are all that’s left. It’s depressing.”

  Carl and Melinda started off across the fields together, Jacob and Annie following. Ruts and footprints had been frozen into the earth, and as they stepped they could sometimes feel a ridge crumble softly underfoot.

  “It’s their Stonehenge and their Westminster Abbey in one, then, what with the cemetery,” Melinda said, “which has all the nation’s poets and the painters.”

  “Do you ever wonder what you’ll be some day?” Carl asked. Jacob and Annie could hear him but he wasn’t addressing them.

  “Sometimes,” Melinda gently answered. “What a thought.”

  “It sounds a little grand,” he apologized.

  “But we must all become something.”

  “Advise me,” he appealed to her.

  “I couldn’t possibly.”

  “What about you? What are you going to become?”

  She put him off at first, but after a few minutes, she let him ask the lesser question of why she had come to Prague. She had come with Rafe, of course. That didn’t mean she hadn’t thought for herself, but she tried to make light of the thinking she had done, in the joking way that Carl made light of things. She wasn’t quite able to. She said that in going abroad one wanted adventure and one didn’t want it, and that there were costs on both sides. Even this modest confession seemed to embarrass her a little. Jacob sensed that she was reluctant to put into more precise words what her expectations had been, because she didn’t want to be exposed to disappointments that she had so far been able to overlook and which, in so far as she was still able to overlook them, might be thought of as not yet quite existing. It was for men to have careers, in particular American men, she joked, but she didn’t seem to expect her joke to be believed, not least because there was little sign of a career in Carl. One sensed, with both of them, that neither felt that anything had been promised, but that they were waiting, nonetheless, for possibilities that they weren’t yet ready to give up on. They were holding out for recognition, for the hope that the lineaments of what they were looking for would be as familiar and resonant as a person’s.

  “And what will I be, do you think?” Carl asked, returning to himself.

  “I should think you would do well as a flâneur,” Melinda suggested.

  “Excellent,” he answered.

  They found that the church was shut indefinitely for repair. The cemetery was, too, though without explanation. They turned back to the lawns they had just crossed and wandered among the statuary for lack of anything else to see. “I think somewhere there’s a path that leads to Libuše’s bath house,” Jacob volunteered, but his suggestion of looking for it found no takers. The statues weren’t originals but concrete replicas, clumsily made. They had been cast in pieces, and the mortar joining them had discolored at a different rate than the concrete, so that a gray princess was bisected at her waist by a yellow zone, sloppy where the mortar had been smeared into crevices. Her left hand, gracefully extended, was heavy at the wrist, in a way that suggested that beauty of line had been sacrificed for stability of concrete—a narrower wrist might have been too likely to snap.

  “It’s for stunning carp,” Melinda said, and brought her own wrist down as if administering a blow.

  “Oh, it’s Libuše herself,” Jacob said, reading the statue’s caption.

  “Who’s she, then?” Annie asked.

  A youth with a hammer sat at her feet and was turning his head as if to follow her gaze. “She was to be queen,” Melinda explained, “but the Czechs refused to be ruled by a female, so she chose this peasant as her husband, and made him king.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Annie. “I should think she would have just chopped off their heads or what have you.”

  “I suppose she would have done in England,” Melinda said.

  “Look at his hair,” Jacob said. “He’s the pretty one in the couple.”

  Carl agreed. “She’s a little vague around her…”

  “Mmm,” said Melinda. “Whereas his robes cling to him in rather a nice way.”

  Jacob moved on to dutifully inspect the other statues. Annie trailed him for company, and when he found a path, she agreed to explore it with him.

  “Don’t be long; it’s cold,” Melinda ordered.

  The path had been kept clear by a light service vehicle of some kind, whose wheels had marked it with a double rut, and the trees on either side were saplings and scrub.

  “Are you certain this is part of the gardens?” Annie asked.

  “No,” Jacob admitted, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in continuing. He noticed cross-paths through the thin woods where people had taken short cuts. In the shelter of the woods there were islands of snow, but where the snow was crossed by footpaths, the ground had been tramped clear. He wondered if men came here to meet in the evenings. He hoped the idea wouldn’t occur to Annie. Of course there was no one here now but his friends.

  “I did think at first that you and Carl would make a couple,” Annie said. “I suppose I hoped it for your sake. He’s very fine.”

  “I’m glad you like him.”

  “I hope Melinda won’t be too hard on him.”

  “He kind of forces her to be.”

  “He doesn’t seem able to help himself, does he. How was it the other night? With the poetry club?”

  “It isn’t poetry.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It went well. But I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “I didn’t ask, did I. I didn’t ask anything particular. So it went well. That’s lovely.”

  “Oh, don’t—”

  “I’m not, am I. I’m not. It’s your poetry club. I don’t suppose what Henry wrote was really so very ‘sexual,’ after all.”

  “I think it’s more the emotions he wants to keep private.”

  “Oh, he has emotions, has he.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he repeated.

  “I won’t tell, Jacob.”

  The path ended at the threshold of a nondescript structure: brown-tinted Czech stucco on a stone foundation. “Is this Libuše’s baths?” Jacob asked aloud. The building looked modest and utilitarian.

  “It’s a shed, I believe,” said Annie.

  Annie folded her arms. Jacob tried to look into a window, but he couldn’t see anything. The woods continued behind the shed, sloping downward. He took two steps and sank into a layer of black leaves that the snow had hidden.

  “Please don’t, Jacob. It’s a drop and then there’s that highway along the Moldau.”

  “I’m not going to fall onto a highway,” he assured her, but he returned to the path.

  They began to retrace their steps. Jacob hated to give up on a search, and he became sullen.

  “Are you still off men?” Annie asked.

  “I’m not off them.”

  “I mean not looking. Not for now.”

  “Yes,” Jacob said.

  “I believe I am as well.” She glanced at him. He sensed that she wanted him to ask a question, but he had noticed a scratchiness in the back of his throat and he decided to conserve his energy. “I have this feeling of sufficiency,” she continued. “I have the . I have my teaching. I’m quite good at teaching, you know. My students are quite fond of me, have I told you tha
t? They pay us so little, yet I find myself saving crowns. I was telling Melinda, sometimes I feel as if I could go on for years here.”

  “A couple of months ago you couldn’t stand it.”

  “But I thought then that I was the only one, you see. But we’re all, nearly all—it’s as if we were meant to be building something in ourselves, for now. Do you see it like that? You needn’t pretend to agree with me if you don’t. It’s peculiar to talk about, I suppose.”

  “I think I’m getting sick again,” he announced.

  “Are you? I’m so sorry. Shall we go back?”

  They returned to the clearing. For a moment they thought that Carl and Melinda had abandoned them, but then Annie spotted them standing on a sort of rampart that overlooked the river. Carl turned to face them but Melinda continued to look at the other castle, the more famous one, miles away in the distance, across the river and to the north. “Did you see the baths?” Carl asked. “They’re halfway down the hill. You lean out here as far as you can and look left and you can see the corner of them. They’re lame.”

  “Jacob’s ill again,” Annie told them.

  His only symptom so far was a slowness in the way he was registering his impressions. When his friends spoke, it required an effort to understand their words in the same rhythm that they were speaking them; the meaning seemed to lag behind. “It’s just a little fever,” he said.

  “Ubožátko,” Melinda consoled him. Poor little one.

  “Will you be able to make it home?” Carl asked.

  They fell silent as they walked back toward the subway. It took a little while for Jacob to notice the silence, because he found himself counting his breaths against his steps, already slipping into the trivial self-involvement of an invalid.

  “It’s too bad the church wasn’t open,” he apologized.

  “It isn’t as if one could call ahead,” said Melinda.

  “It was lovely, Jacob,” Annie insisted. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  On the subway platform, Annie arranged to spend the rest of the afternoon with Melinda, helping to prepare the flat for Rafe’s return. At Muzeum the women changed lines, leaving the men alone.

  Changing to the tram at Palmovka took more of Jacob’s energy than he had expected. Fortunately he and Carl found seats. Jacob wrapped his fatigue around his shoulders like a blanket and shut his eyes. He felt the winter sun tapping his face as the tram crossed the spaces between buildings.

  “Are you all right?” Carl asked.

  Jacob sensed that Carl was trying to find out whether he was well enough to hear a piece of news. He nodded and opened his eyes. “What is it?” But he was already asking the question from inside the shell that belonged to the illness, the shell he had built for himself in the days he had spent alone with it, before Carl came.

  “I asked her if she was interested,” Carl said.

  Slowly Jacob asked, “What did she say?”

  “She was, I don’t know, cavalier. ‘How could I not be?’ At first. You know, as if it was all nothing, which I suppose it is. Did you like it up there? It was pretty cold with that wind. And then she said, ‘But you’ve broken the rules.’”

  Jacob nodded. To help himself follow, he pictured Carl and Melinda in his mind’s eye as they must have looked as they stood at the ledge of Vyšehrad, overlooking the Vltava River.

  “‘We were supposed to go as long as we could,’ she said. ‘Without knowing whether the same thought was in the other’s mind.’

  “I said I was sorry,” Carl continued, “and she said one isn’t sorry for such things, and I said she was right, really I wasn’t sorry, and what were we going to do. She said, ‘Just this, I think.’ I asked what this is, and she said it again: ‘Just this.’ Then you and Annie came back.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jacob.

  “Nothing to feel sorry for.” He took off his gloves and folded in the thumbs so that they could lie together flat on one of his knees. “It’s sort of nice.” A shine in his eyes suggested that in fact he saw it as a victory.

  * * *

  Carl offered to scramble some eggs for dinner, and as he assembled the ingredients, Jacob found himself beginning to worry so intensely about whether Carl was going to measure out the right proportions of salt, pepper, butter, and egg that he removed himself from the kitchen and lay down on his sofa. He closed his eyes and made an effort to let go of the numbers. He imagined them floating up into the air above him. After a time, he heard Carl call out that dinner was ready.

  The eggs themselves soothed his throat while he ate them, but when he asked Carl about his face, which felt warm, Carl said it was flushed. Jacob rinsed a washcloth under the tap and took it and his thermometer to bed with him on the sofa. When he was sick he didn’t like to move the sofa cushions to the floor. He realized that he was falling back into the routine that he had established when he was ill before. He assured Carl there was nothing he needed, closed his eyes, and shuddered under his blanket, the washcloth folded across his forehead, until his trunk felt warm and his forehead cool.

  Following its usual rhythm, the fever broke in the early hours of the morning, and after breakfast walked with him to the day clinic for a new neschopenka and a new course of antibiotics. Jacob ordered Carl to go out and have fun, saying that would help him if he needed anything, and when he returned from the clinic, the apartment was empty. In the silence he took a deep breath. It felt to him as if he were repossessing the space, as if he were returning to the strange peacefulness of his earlier confinement. And something like his impression proved to be the case in the days following. In the hours when his head was clear, it was as if he had returned to a secret kingdom he had once known. But this time he had Václav, whom he sat with and babbled to when he was too feebleminded to read, and every evening Carl came home.

  He went back to La Chartreuse de Parme. Fabrice was imprisoned high up in the Tour Farnèse, in a wooden cell fitted inside a stone one. Fabrice could see Clélia through a hole in the abat-jour of his window, and he tore pages out of books to make an alphabet, with which he signaled to her. Because of Clélia, Fabrice didn’t want to escape, and it occurred to Jacob that he didn’t want to escape his cell, either. He wondered if he, too, was in love. Carl, in love with Melinda, didn’t seem to want to be free. “Is that a good idea?” a psychotherapist had asked Jacob two summers earlier, when he had confessed that he wanted to room with a straight man he had then been in love with. He had done it anyway and it hadn’t had any terrible consequences.

  Because of his relapse he saw no one in his landlord’s family for almost a week. Then at noon one day, during a midwinter thaw, he saw working in the courtyard with Bardo and Aja and realized that he missed talking to her. He was beginning to mend, and he thought it would be nice to feel the sun and play with the dogs. Mr. Stehlík’s scolding had upset him more than he had admitted to his friends; there had been something wild in the landlord’s anger, as if a restraint had snapped, and it had made Jacob aware for the first time of both the anger and the restraint. It was through that he was most likely to be able to repair fences, if they could be repaired. In his coat and boots, he ventured outside.

  “Ahoj,” saluted him. The terrier growled and circled nervously; the boxer hung her head and approached Jacob with a moseying gait, her tail wagging. reproached both animals, and neither listened to her, but the terrier desisted when she saw the boxer’s acceptance of him. —Are you better? asked.

  —A little, Jacob answered. He took off a glove and let Aja snuffle his fingers.

  —She smells Václav, observed.

  —Yes.

  had taken two large red nylon rucksacks, emblazoned with the name and logo of a manufacturer of skiing equipment, out of the uninhabited rooms on the ground floor, and had set them down beside the driveway, evidently to load them in the car when it returned from an errand.

  —Are you going to the country? Jacob asked. —Are you going for a ‘ski’?

  —For a ‘ski
’? she asked, quizzically. Jacob had guessed she would understand the English word, but maybe she didn’t. She looked around to see what he was looking at. —Ah, she said when she saw the rucksacks. She looked down at the ground as if in shame, and then up at the sky as if in comic expostulation. —Do you know, what it is? she asked. She was smiling her conspirator’s smile and dropped her voice so as not to be overheard by anyone inside the house.

  —I don’t know, Jacob answered, also dropping his voice.

  —Grandfather and Grandmother.

  Involuntarily Jacob looked at the bags again. —The ones who…?

  —Two years ago. And here we still have them.

  Jacob felt his heart race. —Ashes? he asked.

  —Of course, of course, answered. —Jesus Mary, if not…

  Jacob was at a loss for words, so continued. —They were so lovely, so kind. They gave us everything. And here we still have them. She shrugged.

  —Are you going to…, Jacob asked, his vocabulary faltering. —In the country?

  —Finally. She clasped her hands together in gratitude.

  —Near your chata?

  —Well, yes, thus.

  —Then that’s good, Jacob said, and made an effort not to look at the bags again. —I’m sorry, he said, —that I angered your father.

  pretended to be puzzled for a moment, as if she didn’t know what he was referring to. —Tata is very nervous now, she told him. —You mustn’t worry, but it is better if we…She made a calming gesture with her hands, leaning over at the same time, as if to block an imaginary sound with her body.

  —Why is he nervous?

  —Yes, why? she echoed, and looked off to one side. —Just thus, she finally said, concluding a train of thought she didn’t share. —Do you know, she continued, —you will have neighbor?

  —In the empty rooms?

  —They are not yet empty, she corrected him. She threw back her frizzy hair, and her face became jittery with good humor again. —That is my task, she lamented.

  —Who will it be?

  —Our plumber, Honza, she said.

  Honza was a short, wiry, boyish man, about forty, with a tanned, lined face. He had recently started work on a project in the empty rooms, and he crossed paths with Carl and Jacob from time to time. He always shouted at them genially, as if louder Czech were easier to understand, and he addressed them as “kluci,” boys, rather than as “panové,” gentlemen.