Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  was waiting for Jacob’s reaction.

  —The little fellow, Jacob said.

  —Little Honza, confirmed.

  —He’s sympathetic, Jacob said. —How long does he stay?

  —Until he finishes the plumbing? She shrugged in embarrassment. —And now I must empty his rooms. Do you want to help me?

  —I’m sick, he said, and he crossed his arms over his chest and hunched his shoulders for effect.

  —But perhaps you are bored?

  —I’m writing.

  —That’s a good one! About our family, no doubt.

  —No, no. It’s fiction.

  —Yes, well, I understand. But be nice.

  —But really! I write about something else.

  —Yes, well, yes, well. It will be quite a beauty! she said, as if she were already steeling herself. —Our crazy family in a book.

  In fact Jacob was trying to write about Meredith. The doctor at the clinic had given him two weeks “to start with,” and though Jacob wasn’t sure he could afford two weeks now that so much of his income came from private students, he had them, and he had their peace and quiet. Between chapters of Stendhal, therefore, he sat at his typewriter.

  A blank sheet sat fixed in his machine so long that the platen set a curl in it. It seemed wrong to write about Meredith and wrong not to write about her. He knew he was angry with her. She had been the poet of their generation—all her friends had thought themselves lucky to have met her in her youth—and she had thrown away her talent with her life. She had also thrown away an understanding they had shared, a little prize they had conspired to give themselves, that no one their age could have deserved: the sense not merely that they were going to give their lives to writing but that somehow they already had.

  What killed her, however, was another thing, a darker one, which she and Jacob had joked about together at lunch one day, while their companions at the table had sat by, puzzled.

  “Its relation to writing isn’t causal,” Jacob had said.

  “No, no,” she had dismissively agreed, tapping her fork dangerously. “‘Causal’—that’s vulgar. ‘Contiguous’?” she had suggested.

  “Perhaps the territories are contiguous,” Jacob had replied.

  “‘Congruent’?” she had also suggested but at once took it back. “No, no. ‘Contiguous.’” Suddenly she let down her fork with a clatter. “A Venn diagram!” She covered her mouth. “A Venn diagram is needed.” She always wore a bright red lipstick to lunch, as if to defy any shame or awkwardness that might be associated in some minds with the process of eating.

  “What are you talking about?” a young man beside her had complained, and now, in Prague, Jacob couldn’t remember for certain the specific noun whose relation to writing they had been trying to find an adjective for. It might have been “unhappiness.” He had tripped over the thing beneath the word later, when he and Meredith had tried very briefly to become lovers.

  Was there a connection, or wasn’t there? He decided to write about visiting her grave and rebutting there the answer that her death seemed to imply. She had no doubt been buried by her family in Virginia, but for the purposes of his story, he imagined the cemetery in the Massachusetts town where he himself had grown up. He knew what that cemetery looked like. If she were buried there, her plot would be down the hill, in the contemporary area where the lawn was smoother and the headstones were thicker and more polished. He imagined himself standing before hers. Unfortunately, he couldn’t bring the character based on himself to say what was on his mind, and he couldn’t write intelligibly about the romantic confusion that that character and the character based on Meredith fell into. He labored at the story anyway. He invented another character, a man who also came to the grave and cried there unabashedly. He had once read an essay about a short story in which something similar had happened. Very confusedly, he tried to make the character based on himself seduce the character who cried, but he couldn’t make the seduction plausible. The whole thing refused to come to life. It was no more than a series of described gestures.

  He hid the pages in the evening when he heard Carl’s key in the door. “Hey,” Carl would call out, and then set down his bag with a thump beside the refrigerator. Jacob would come into the kitchen, sit at the table, and listen to the sound of running water as Carl washed his hands and face. Then Carl would sit down across from him with a glass of water to report on his day. His beard was now full, and his hair, too, was growing longer. He combed drops of water out of his beard with his fingers as he spoke.

  Sometimes he had fallen in with American tourists at a café and had spent the day flirting with the women and debating philosophy with the men. Often he had met Henry at his office in Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, and they had gone for lunch. Henry worked at the Czechoslovak office for visiting foreign students, which stood in relation to the international students union, where Hans worked, roughly as the government had stood until recently in relation to the party, and was therefore slightly less doomed and much more busy. Carl reported that Henry took his job seriously and always returned to his office within an hour, no matter how far their confidences and arguments took them. Carl was then left to wander on his own in the district with a head full of ideas. Once he came home with a set of cream-colored plates, bowls, teacups, and saucers, freckled with age and embellished with delicate red and silver tracery, which he had purchased in an antikvariát for ten dollars probably because, he said, he and Henry had been talking about whether it was possible to reconcile the need for a home with the search for beauty. He presented them as a gift for the apartment, saying that he didn’t think they’d survive transport to America.

  One evening, Carl told Jacob that he had dropped in on Mel and Rafe in Havelská and had drunk slivovitz with them.

  “How was that?” Jacob asked.

  “They send their love,” Carl replied. His face still seemed a little muddied by the liqueur they had given him. “Kaspar’s coming to see you tomorrow,” he reported. “Melinda says he was very grateful for your visit, and apparently he’s back from Berlin.”

  “I didn’t know he had gone there.”

  “His father’s sick. The one in the Stasi.”

  “I didn’t know about that, either.”

  “That may not be exactly right. Melinda said he was in the Stasi, but Rafe said he thought he was just an informer. But Melinda said Kaspar hated him so much he couldn’t just have been an informer. I guess he was a professor?”

  “I bet if you were a professor, you had to cooperate.”

  They fell silent for a moment. Jacob noticed that Václav’s water dish was empty and refilled it.

  “I won’t be here tomorrow,” Carl said. “I told Melinda I’d go with her to the castle to see the mediocre Impressionists they have.”

  “Rafe doesn’t mind?”

  “It’s just bad art. I’m always missing Kaspar. I wonder if I’ll see him even once before I leave Prague.”

  “You’ll see him.”

  “Not seeing him would be like going to Bern and not seeing the bear.”

  “He’s just a person,” Jacob said.

  “I don’t know,” Carl said facetiously. “This whole ‘Could you spare a little crust of eating bread?’ routine, where he goes to town on Mel and Rafe’s refrigerator?”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s very principled.”

  “I guess so, if he won’t speak to his father.”

  “I thought you said he went to Berlin.”

  “But he wouldn’t speak to him, is what Melinda said. He just saw him.”

  The sun had set while they had been talking, and the light that still fell into the apartment was now even and gray. “Are you hungry?” Carl asked.

  Jacob shrugged.

  Carl got up and looked in the refrigerator. “Can you eat another tuna-fish sandwich?”

  “I’ll make them.” Jacob was pretty sure the olives in the can he’d opened last week were still good. He
also liked to put in grated carrots, because he thought the two of them needed vitamins. Carl dragged his bag to his bedroom to unpack it.

  “Did Rafe say what he was really doing in Brussels?” Jacob called out across the apartment.

  “I’ve decided not to think about that question any more,” came back the reply. “You know, with the war and everything.” He laughed at his own disingenuousness.

  * * *

  From his bedroom window, Jacob saw Kaspar trying to ring the disconnected buzzer in the gatepost at the end of the driveway. The dogs saw him, too, and began to bark, but before could come downstairs, Jacob threw on his coat and, with his boots untied, walked out the back of the house and around to the sidewalk. The weather had turned cold again, and he could feel chilly air fingering his ankles.

  Under the German’s scarf was another scarf, and under his coat he wore two sweaters. “Don’t take off your shoes if you don’t want to,” Jacob said. “I don’t have any slippers to offer you.”

  “But I am wearing socks.” He glanced down to show them off as he pulled his feet out of his shoes. “Pretty white socks, from the mother of Rafe, for his exercise.”

  “He didn’t want them?”

  “He said no,” Kaspar answered, marveling at his good luck and staring at Jacob steadily, almost hungrily, as if he were afraid of missing any part of Jacob’s reaction. Jacob stared back out of a confused kind of politeness. They stepped into Jacob’s kitchen, still awkwardly linked by the eyes. The curtains were wide open, and in the afternoon sun, Jacob noticed how much thinner Kaspar’s beard was than Carl’s. Among its gray and red bristles were patches of cheek as neutral and delicate as the new skin revealed when a scab falls off.

  “Water? Milk?” Jacob offered. “Tea?”

  “I will have milk. And perhaps later tea.” His eagerness to accept had the effect of making the bestower feel almost princely.

  “Please, sit down,” Jacob offered.

  Instead Kaspar approached Jacob and touched him on the forearm, startling him. “But first, if it is not a trouble,” Kaspar said, “I would like to see, where it is that you write.” He studied Jacob’s face. “Oh,” he continued, stepping back as if sensing he had intruded, “is it already here?” He pointed to the kitchen table he had hesitated to sit down at.

  “Sometimes. But it’s—.” Too embarrassed to finish the sentence, Jacob stepped into the doorway of his bedroom and pointed at his Olivetti, which sat, an oversize paperweight, on top of the pages that he had managed to type about Meredith.

  “You write in sitting on the floor?” Kaspar’s tone suggested he was willing to believe in an athletic regimen of some kind.

  “No, I usually put the typewriter on that little table.”

  “May I?” Kaspar asked. He walked into the bedroom and crouched down beside the machine. “But it is lovely,” he admired.

  The Olivetti was a subtle jade color, the finish of its metal cool to the touch, and its curves sensuous. When pressed, the pads of the keys swung down and into the machine with an easy heaviness, and the type bars struck the platen with orderly, satisfying claps. It had cost a hundred dollars in a used-typewriter store in Cambridge. An older boy, another crush of Jacob’s, had had one just like it, and after Jacob had bought it, Jacob had been afraid that there was something indecent about his having a typewriter just like his friend’s. It was as if he had bought a piece of clothing beyond his means and then realized that the extravagance would show if he wore it in public. Fortunately, a typewriter isn’t public, for the most part. Carl was allowed to borrow it, of course.

  They retreated to the kitchen, and in a somewhat businesslike manner Jacob poured Kaspar a glass of milk. Kaspar drank it greedily but methodically, sucking stray drops out of his ragged moustache between sips. Halfway through, he paused and fell still, and the hamster, whose cage was at his elbow, crept out of a nest of paper. The animal, however, made no impression on the German, who looked only at Jacob, who after a while did not know where to look. He thought of finding his camera and taking Kaspar’s picture, so that Carl would be able to see what Kaspar looked like.

  “It is cold,” Kaspar said, at last.

  “The milk?” Jacob asked.

  “I wanted to say, that the day is cold, but the milk also.”

  “I could warm the milk up for you.”

  “Ah no! I am only waiting a moment, in order to make longer my enjoyment.”

  “Oh,” said Jacob. The delay was a philosophical adjustment of some kind; Jacob was afraid it was rude to have called attention to it. “Thank you for coming all the way out here,” Jacob continued.

  “Not at all. It is not far. And I have brought you, I now remember, something from Melinda. Fishes.”

  “Fishes?”

  “They are from the West.” He rummaged in the knapsack at his feet and brought out a red tin of Spanish anchovies.

  Because Jacob had never eaten any, the gift frightened him a little, but he made an effort to rise to the challenge. “Thank you.”

  “Perhaps, when we have the tea,” Kaspar suggested.

  “Oh, good idea.”

  “You seem in good health,” Kaspar said, resuming his milk.

  “My neschopenka is up on Wednesday, and I think I’ll go back to work.”

  “And your war, also, is ‘up,’ as you say.”

  “My war?”

  “In Kuwait. Since two days, I think.” Seeing that the news surprised Jacob, Kaspar shrugged, to make light of it. “It changes nothing.”

  “Well, I guess that was the point.”

  “Mmm,” said Kaspar, slouching over his glass.

  “You have a theory.”

  “Not today! At least there were no bombs in Prague. Do you know, I have been in Berlin.”

  “I heard. To see your father. Is he all right?”

  “He is going to die,” Kaspar answered, with a little smile. His eyes shifted to his glass, inside which the milk had left a bluish film.

  Jacob had the impression that in saying this Kaspar had wanted to make him laugh. “You say that as if—”

  “A month ago I was going to die, and now he.” He shrugged it off as he had shrugged off the war against Iraq. “We are a family. He is, do you know—the word in Czech is .”

  Jacob nodded. When the student newspaper editors had published the StB contract, they had used the word in their caption.

  “He cannot bear to be out of favor,” Kaspar continued. “Even with me, now, he thinks it would be something to be in favor.”

  Jacob nodded, trying not to take a side in a family dispute. Kaspar’s face seemed looser and paler than it had been a moment ago, as if he were drawing license for what he was saying from his own illness.

  “I love him as one loves a dog or a cow,” Kaspar continued. “Something you do not speak to.”

  “Did he say anything when you saw him?”

  “Many things.” Kaspar waved a hand with a flourish, to suggest rhetorical flights. His smile grew crooked and subtle. “But I am interested in your progress,” he said, by way of closing the subject.

  Jacob shrugged and held off Kaspar’s attention for a few more moments: “Will you write about it?”

  “About Berlin?” Kaspar hesitated. “Oh, I translate, and I comment. But I am not so a writer.”

  “Comment is writing.”

  “If you say.” He seemed pleased by Jacob’s solicitude, and Jacob wondered if it was his duty to invite Kaspar to join the writing group. “Have you written, in your ‘holiday’?”

  “I’m trying to write about my friend, but I’ve been having some trouble,” Jacob admitted.

  Kaspar’s face brightened at the opportunity to be of use.

  “I think it’s because I’m angry at her.”

  “It is about her,” Kaspar said, to be sure he understood.

  “It’s fiction.”

  “Of course, of course. And what is the nature of the trouble?”

  Jacob hesitated and then said,
“Maybe you could read what I have.”

  “May I? Then let us have the tea, and perhaps to open the fishes and to have them with little breads as I read, yes? Do you say that in English, , as the Czechs do?”

  “No, but only because we don’t eat them. We have crackers.”

  “That’s right. ‘Crackers.’”

  Jacob put teabags into cups and a kettle of water on to boil and fetched the pages about Meredith from the bedroom. Kaspar fluttered them in his hands to get a sense of how many there were, and then took from a pocket somewhere beneath his sweaters a pair of glasses with silver frames. “If I am to think while I read, I must either smoke or eat,” he said, as Jacob began to cut slices from a loaf of caraway-seed bread. Jacob put the slices on one plate and then opened the tin of anchovies on another.

  “A fork, I think,” Kaspar suggested.

  Jacob hadn’t focused on the actual eating of the anchovies. He handed Kaspar a fork and watched him spear one of the tiny pink-and-silver filets out of the oil and uncurl it on a slice of bread. Since no harm came to Kaspar after swallowing, Jacob imitated him. The flavor was mostly salt and sourness. He had been afraid he would be able to feel the prickle of the fish’s bones as he chewed, but he couldn’t.

  “It is good, že jo,” Kaspar said.

  “It is,” Jacob said, polite and unconvinced.

  Kaspar began to read. Jacob took up last week’s newsmagazine, which Carl had bought for him, and stared at it in his lap, pretending that he was reading also. He guessed that Kaspar wouldn’t notice if he didn’t eat any more anchovies, and in fact Kaspar didn’t notice. The room fell silent, except for the rustle of pages and Kaspar’s slow chewing. When the kettle whistled, Jacob rose and poured the water and brought the cups to the table.

  For camouflage, Jacob continued to run his eyes emptily over the columns of the magazine. That was the trouble, wasn’t it, he thought to himself—that he was angry with Meredith. It was interfering somehow. She had been murdered, and it was unfair to be angry at her. On the other hand, because she had done the murdering, he was right to be angry at her. She had taken away her recognition of him when she left. Was he trying to take it back? Maybe what interfered was guilt. Maybe telling her story was too much like stealing it from her. He was calling attention to himself by writing the story, after all, making himself out to be something he hadn’t in fact been. While she was alive, he hadn’t even been able to say he was in love with her. Then again there might be no moral factor at all; a part of him might just be trying to protect himself, to push Meredith and what he had shared with her away.…The longer he thought about it, the less able he was to tell the difference between what was his doing and what was, at least in his own mind, Meredith’s. It also became hard to tell the difference between what he wanted and what he was afraid of. It was a way of thinking that didn’t lend itself to storytelling. There was no knight to pick up the sword, no growling bear to slay, no princess who asked to be married. Everything was also its opposite; nothing was capable of change. Perhaps he didn’t want anything to change, as if by making reluctance into a principle, he could keep Meredith alive. In that case his story was like Henry’s, without his having intended it to be. In that case it was a story about not wanting to tell a story.…