Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  He came to a clearing. On a pedestal, a bronze soldier with a machine gun overlooked rows of white stone pillars, which marked the graves of Russian officers who had died in Czechoslovakia during World War II. The style was anonymous and menacing. Except for a heavy concrete star, emblazoned with hammer and sickle, the tableau wouldn’t have looked out of place in Washington, DC.

  The graves of the Victorian merchant families were more comforting, cluttered as they were with elaborated crucifixes and statues of gowned women. Jacob returned to them. Some headstones bore white porcelain ovals into which a hand-tinted photograph had been transferred. On others, there was no more decoration than spindly bronze letters, fringed with verdigris, spelling out a family name. Walking south, he reached a low wall that served as a columbarium. The ashes stored behind its gray doors must have belonged to people recently lost, because the doors were decorated with ribbons and wreaths of flowers, faded and papery from exposure.

  A traditional grave slab nearby was littered with so many flowers that Jacob wondered whose it was. A margin of soiled wax disks—the stubs of burnt-down candles—rolled over the foot. The headstone was blank, but a piece of paper glued to it identified the remains as those of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself on fire and burned to death in Wenceslas Square in 1969, as a protest against the Russian invasion.

  He was one of the revolution’s martyrs; candles were brought to him because fire was his emblem. Jacob realized that he hated the tribute. If Palach had killed himself, he must have been fragile and unhappy, and it seemed wrong to make use of his death, even in a good cause. Where had he gotten the idea of making his death a gift? There was always a demanding voice, saying things like that, but that voice could never be pleased.

  Jacob knew Kafka was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery, which was on the other side of a high wall, and he now walked half a block along a busy street to get there. The street hummed its indifference. At a tobacconist’s kiosk, a sheaf of Sparty were tilted loosely against one another in a drinking glass, three crowns each. Jacob didn’t want to buy a whole pack because he thought he should try to smoke less. Also, he hadn’t brought his matches, and a box of matches cost five crowns. He couldn’t bring himself to pay eight crowns for one smoke, and at the moment he felt too fragile to ask a stranger for a light. If he were to ask for a light and be refused,…He walked on, forgoing the pleasure of nicotine. After all, Milo didn’t smoke.

  Palach had no doubt remembered to bring his matches. He could have brought the gasoline in a thermos. When first poured on, the gasoline would have felt pleasantly cool, if the day had been as warm as today. But maybe it hadn’t happened in spring—maybe it had happened in winter. Would he have taken off his coat, if he’d been wearing one? The flames would have lit up on his arms, legs, and face almost simultaneously. The fire wouldn’t have hurt while it fed on the gasoline. Jacob wondered if Meredith had changed her mind after it was too late.

  In the Jewish cemetery, the grass had been trimmed only in the first row of graves, those fronting the street. Jacob walked along it. Behind the irregular palisade of headstones, there were green shadows carpeted with vines. Scrub trees shot up and struggled to pierce the canopies of older trees, which kept out the sun.

  At the end of the row, Jacob recognized the angular white stele of Kafka’s grave from a biography he had read. A little mess of ferns had sprouted at its base. He stared absentmindedly at the cleared square of white gravel that the stele rose from. Had he expected to feel something here? He remembered the first sentence of “The Metamorphosis,” but it was a strange thing to think of saying at a person’s grave, from which a person would never awake and where one changed into…what? Kafka had been buried with his parents. Jacob wondered if it had bothered Kafka to know that he was leaving them with the burden of burying him.

  Jacob took a few steps into the relative wilderness behind the grave. The disorder seemed to represent what Prague really thought of the writer—what it would have expressed if the visits of tourists didn’t constrain it. Jacob had the feeling of standing behind stage, in a place where no care had been taken about lines of sight. Weeds curled up the front of gravestones whose backs, because they faced Kafka, had been kept clear. A certain protection was nonetheless afforded, even on the lee side of sightlines, by proximity to the writer’s grave, and as Jacob walked farther away from it, he had the sense of wading into a sea. Bland, dark leaves hid first the footpaths and then the slabs that sealed the graves. In the deepest rows, ivy shrouded headstones as tall as Jacob was, fat leaves nodding here as everywhere with inoffensiveness and complacency. Young trees seemed to pry headstones from their bases, and older ones seemed to rummage with their roots, though the dislodging and the rifling were taking place with a peaceful, immemorial slowness. Was it upsetting, if there was no one alive to be upset by it? It wasn’t accurate to call the process decay, because it was after all life. If you thought your death could be a gift, this is what you thought of, not the neatness of a tended grave but the abandon of a forgotten one, where there isn’t much distinction between one grave and another, and with the passage of time less and less difference between having lived and not having lived.

  He pulled himself out of the vines impatiently.

  * * *

  —Here the American prepares the water for his bath.

  —But wait.

  —That isn’t a bother. Leave it. This is documentary. How many pots are you boiling, Mr. American?

  —Four. My hamster lives in the fifth.

  —We are here witnesses of history.

  —Will you be a participant?

  —I’m the documentarist.

  —Naked documentarist.

  —So that I do not frighten the native.

  —Will they print these photos?

  —I’ll print them.

  —You know how?

  —I photographed on Václavák during the revolution.

  —Truly? You’re a photograph?

  —Photographer, Milo corrected.

  —Photographer. I want to see your photographs.

  —They’re at Dad’s. Hey, you’re boiling.

  —Attention, Jacob warned.

  —He puts on his Czech underwear. Normally he is furt naked, this native. Mr. Native, why Czech underwear?

  The boxers were striped red and white like peppermint candy. They held Jacob only loosely and went no lower than his crotch. He had to crumple the fabric down when he puts his pants on over them, or they would ride up too high.

  —Normally these aren’t to be seen. The American ones wore out.

  —You lost them.

  —In the Czech forest.

  —The American pours the hot water into his tub. The American must be strong in order to carry his pots.

  —When can I see the photos? Jacob asked.

  —One or two are on exhibit at the Powder Tower. The American sweats in his labor. He reddens from the heat.

  —Are you coming in with me? Jacob asked, running a little of the cold water now.

  —It will be quite splendid, I think, this documentary of the American in Prague and his pots of hot water.

  —Are you coming in?

  —That one they certainly won’t print.

  —Are you coming?

  —Wait, wait, said Milo, putting his camera aside.

  * * *

  On bright days, now, most of the streets of the district were lively with tourists even in the early morning. Charles Bridge, however, drew so many of them away, to the far side of the river in pursuit of the castle, that in north of the bridge one felt their absence. Along the avenues, large unimaginative administrative buildings sat mysteriously silent, their doors still, their shades drawn against the sun. Perhaps they had once been filled by government planning agencies. One morning Annie led Jacob down the neighborhood’s empty walkways toward the river.

  “They’re this way,” she said, once they came to the water. “Just a few meters on, I believe.”<
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  Below, flashing with reflection, dimples scissored themselves in and out of existence.

  “Have you been in one yourself yet?” Jacob asked.

  “That’s just it. What if I were to fall in? Do you think the Czechs would rescue me?”

  “You think I will?”

  “Oh, you’re the sort. Though you might be quite tiresome about it after. Come to think of it I expect you would be.”

  “I fell into the Charles once,” he remembered.

  “You can swim, then.”

  “It wasn’t over my head, where I fell in. Just to my knees.”

  A gangway of whitewashed plywood rested on the stone wall that hemmed the river. With the swell of the river the gangway very gently seesawed, rising and falling like a sleeper’s torso. Annie and Jacob walked down it to a moored barge. A second gangway led them down to a floating dock. Half a dozen skiffs were lashed to its sides.

  They were welcomed somewhat skeptically. Jacob had to promise the man in charge that they knew how to row before the man was willing to take twenty crowns, untie a skiff, and hand Jacob its painter. Annie clambered into the stern. When Jacob followed, the boat swiveled dangerously until he realized he should crouch down. Seated facing her, he drew the oars up from between his legs. Once he had figured out how to hold them, he set the tip of one oar’s blade against the little dock and shoved them off.

  They drifted for a moment. The nose of the skiff had been pointed upriver, toward the Charles Bridge to the south, but the current soon caught the nose and the skiff yawed clockwise, into the middle of the river, until Jacob, realizing that he now had enough sea-room to swing the oars freely, pulled on them and righted the skiff so that it once more stemmed the stream.

  Effortfully they climbed the river. The bright air around them was silent except for intermittent clumsy splashes that he made with the oars. The rowing took more strength than he had imagined it would. He began, however, to find a rhythm. They were far below the level of the city where they usually walked. The tall, mud-gray stone of the embankment seemed to be sheltering them.

  “It’s quite lovely, isn’t it,” said Annie. “I knew it would be.” She brushed the hair from her forehead and blinked her eyes shut for a moment in the sun, appreciating its warmth.

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  “Your man Vincent mentioned it. In his way. ‘Rather urban, compared to punting on the Cam, you know.’ Or some such dreadful thing. What is it you fancy about him, anyway? His lips? He does have nice lips.”

  “His hair.”

  “His curls. I like curls on a man as well. But he’s not worth it, Jacob. He’s not worth putting up with the rest of him. Mind where you’re taking us.”

  “I was going to go through.”

  “Through? You mean under?”

  “There are boats on the other side.” The plain shadow of the Mánes Bridge fell over them, cooling them.

  Annie craned her neck to look between the bridge’s piers. “So there are. I hadn’t seen them. I suppose it’s all right then.”

  They passed through. The sun returned to them while the broad, slow-sloping stones of the bridge’s underside were still overhead. On the right bank the sun was hitting the bleached faces and orange roofs of Malá Strana’s old riverside palaces.

  “Anyway I’m seeing someone again,” Jacob volunteered. “A Czech.”

  “Are you, then.”

  It was not as easy to tell Annie as it would have been to tell Melinda. Annie resisted hearing confessions. “We’re having a good time,” Jacob continued.

  “Am I to congratulate you?”

  “I’m just telling you about myself.”

  “I suppose I am to congratulate you. Do you speak Czech with him?”

  “I spoke it with Luboš.”

  “I don’t know as I realized that.”

  “But this isn’t like with Luboš. It isn’t serious.”

  “That is the way, now,” she said, as if a little disappointed in him.

  “I don’t mean I don’t like him. He’s nicer than Luboš. What I mean is there isn’t any mystery about it.”

  He needed to catch his breath. He shipped the oars. Annie wasn’t looking at him. What he didn’t say was that he was beginning to wonder if this was the way one always ought to go to bed with people: as if it weren’t so meaningful, as if it were to one side of the story one was in.

  “I don’t know as I should mind that, if I were you.”

  “I don’t mind it. Maybe I’m not saying it right.”

  “It might be quite pleasant, to be able to have that,” she said, speculatively. “To be unencumbered, as it were. Though I find in my own case there’s always a mystery, as you call it, if I’m soft on a person.”

  The current was turning the skiff again. Jacob pulled on the oars to straighten it. He watched Annie’s eyes as she watched the Charles Bridge approach, and over his shoulder, every few strokes, he took a glimpse of the tall, jagged, two-story piers himself, so as to be able to aim the boat between two of them.

  “Is it quite safe? With the current, I mean.”

  “I’ll just have to row a little harder.”

  They passed into the black water of the shade of the bridge. Out of the corner of either eye, Jacob watched the gray, triangular battlements slide up from behind and widen, approaching them on either side, in embrace. Then the bridge itself crossed overhead with its water-blackened stones. While it covered them, hands seemed cupped over their ears; all they could hear was the water’s eager lapping against the heavy walls beside them.

  “Are you fair to him?” Annie asked.

  The black stones lifted off, and the air was free and empty again around them. “It’s not like that.” He watched recede the semicircular—circular, in the water’s haphazard mirroring—portal through which they had passed.

  “Isn’t it.”

  “He’s going to Karlovy Vary himself, at the end of the summer.”

  “Not quite to the other end of the world.”

  “Are you going to stay past the summer?” Jacob asked.

  “I might do,” she answered. She glanced at him. “Don’t you want to see how it comes out?”

  Jacob slowed the pace of his rowing. The triangle of water that they were now drifting in had been smoothed by a weir just upriver. From a distance the river’s weirs could look decorative, like narrow cuffs sewn into the fabric of the water’s surface, but as their skiff came up to this one, which blocked any further headway, they were able to appreciate the mass and power of the water shoving itself over. The uniformity of the flow contributed to the impression that it gave of implacability; at every point, the same force was insistently pouring its heavy self downstream.

  “It’s like that between Henry and me, too, now, I suppose,” Annie continued. She had to speak over the churn of the water. “Do you know, I thought I could persuade him to come boating, they give him an hour for lunch, but he wouldn’t do. I think he feared I might get ideas—that it would be too romantic like. But I only asked for the lark.”

  Jacob let the current turn the skiff around. He told himself that while rowing back he would think about Annie’s question, the one about seeing how things came out, but a boat travels faster with the current than against it.

  * * *

  Once or twice a week, Milo spent the night, after having let his father know that he would be staying over at his new American friend’s place. Jacob always woke up early the next morning, eager for them to make love again in the new day. It was as if there were a contest between Jacob and the sun to see who could rise earlier. Spring was blowing into summer, and the sun was racing deeper and deeper into the mornings, but sometimes he managed to wake up into a half-light not unlike the half-light in which he had lived out so much of the winter, gray, tender, and general, though now it belonged not to dusk but dawn. The slate through the window was so even that from the bed it wasn’t possible to tell whether it colored a clear sky or one that was u
niformly cloudy: the ambiguous color itself seemed to be its only real quality. Milo would be lying in bed beside him at a slant, faintly radiant in his pallor and nakedness, sheets and blanket twisted almost into ropes around and sometimes between his legs. Jacob watched the rise and fall of his ribs until he couldn’t watch peacefully any more and woke him.

  There was never any recoil in Jacob, afterward. Because Jacob thought lovemaking was supposed to be free of such reaction, he didn’t wonder much about how he had got free of it. Once, though, when he was feeling pessimistic about himself, it occurred to him that any need he might feel to withdraw from Milo might be sufficiently expressed by the foreknowledge that he was soon going to leave Milo for good, and Prague, too.

  A moment later, such a speculation seemed too cynical. The truth was that there was no need to pull back from Milo, who hopped into sex like a duck into a pond—dunked his head vigorously in, swam about happily, briskly shook his feathers clean afterward. He didn’t act as if the pleasure implied anything about what the two of them were going to do next, though it was clear he wasn’t likely to be averse to repeating it. With regard to the future, he seemed to consider Jacob, as an American, to belong to an order of being set somewhat apart—the order of those who don’t stay, who are a little comical in fact in their transience, an order in which he himself to some degree participated, in that at the end of the summer he was going to move to Karlovy Vary, a town full of tourists, and work for a casino, a cartoonishly capitalist enterprise.

  Jacob wasn’t returning to America for the sake of school or any career that school might lead to. He was returning for the most part because it upset him that in Prague he had written so little—just one fragmentary story about Meredith. He was impatient with his lack of progress (it was to be a long time before he was able to reason with this kind of impatience, let alone resist it), and he hoped that America would force him to prove himself, rank himself. As a measure of self-discipline he was volunteering to give up the exemption that Prague had seemed to offer. It was only on account of having given it up, of having set himself a postponed reckoning, that he was able to let himself enjoy the summer that remained.