Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  —Why won’t he accept? one of the schoolgirls muttered. —The river is ours, isn’t it?

  —The Germans they say believe, that even our river belongs to them, her friend replied.

  —Catastrophe, the first girl said.

  —So let’s go, Milo acquiesced.

  When Jacob set his crumpled napkin on his plate, the first girl wished them “Bon voyage,” her eyes flickering up only for a moment from her pastry.

  —He isn’t German, Milo said, in case the girl had thought Jacob was.

  —He’s American, she replied, as if the fact were written on Jacob’s face.

  Milo looked rather forlorn at first in the stern of the boat, as if he couldn’t bear the foolishness of what they were doing. But as soon as they stood out from shore, too far from any other people to be recognized, his willingness to be knocked about began to collaborate almost against his will with the capering of the skiff. The wind freshened, and it ridged short, choppy waves into the river.

  Jacob let the current pull them down the river, which curved to the north and then east. He touched the oars to the water only to correct the skiff’s path, but even under such faint encouragement the boat was soon slicing at high speed across wave after wave, the waves cheerfully slapping themselves into nothingness against the side of it, the spray from the collisions cooling the air. Under the ponderous face of the hill that had once held Stalin’s monument, beneath the municipal propriety of the Bridge of Svatopluk , their speed felt rash. Surely they were going to be rebuked by someone. The river, like them, became less respectable as it turned the corner. It broadened, unpicturesquely. Along the foot of the right embankment ran a walkway of dirt and brown grass, accessible to no one. Litter from the street above had fallen down into it and seemed to have remained there for a long time uncollected. Just beyond the next bridge, they saw a yacht that had until recently been one of the state-run “botels” and was now a private night club, its new name lettered in purple on a black sign. They could make out a janitor pouring something overboard. On the left bank, the hill was punctured by a dark tunnel.

  —Are you taking me to Germany? Milo asked.

  —We have to turn, don’t we, Jacob recognized.

  Ahead of them, an island divided the river, which was blocked on one side by a weir and on the other by a range of locks. They couldn’t go any farther. Jacob lowered an oar, and the skiff swirled about. The automobile tunnel and the waterborne nightclub were distasteful to Jacob, who had been hoping for an idyll like the one he had shared with Annie. It was hard work to pull the skiff back upstream, but he wanted to badly, so he laid out on the oars—he gave way, as they said in books about going to sea. As he pulled, he imagined that he was rescuing Milo and himself from the aesthetic threats of sleaze and automobile traffic. It was pleasant to know that the boat was powered by his own effort. Once they were above the Bridge of Svatopluk again, he felt safe. Of course it was pleasant, he thought to himself, to do something simple and muscular. After long distrust of his body, it was still a surprise whenever he discovered it could be useful, even in its way reliable. Milo was now leaning back sideways in the stern, resting on one elbow. He had taken off his shoes and socks, and was twiddling his toes. Jacob was sweating freely. When he pulled, he could feel the resistance of Milo’s mass in the boat, balancing him. He boasted to himself that he felt so much at ease in his body at the moment that he might even have taken off his shirt by now if they hadn’t been in the downtown of an old European city. The Mánes Bridge was ahead; the Charles Bridge, just beyond it. They were returning to the company of Prague’s famous sites, which it may have been vulgar to love but which Jacob did love. It was a luxury to be able to move Milo toward them with the angry strength in his hands, arms, legs, and back—to literally transport him.

  —Shall we spell one another? Milo suggested.

  —Yeah, good.

  Jacob shipped the oars. The skiff drifted and began to rock idly with the river’s swell. With indications rather than words they choreographed a change of places, matching their steps until in the center they made the mistake of holding onto each other for a moment instead of onto the gunwales and in the security of their touch unconsciously rose from their crouches. The boat seesawed; they fell apart and scrambled down into their new seats.

  “Ježišmarja,” Milo swore.

  The boat was moseying downstream again. —You’ll have to turn, Jacob advised.

  The oars splashed as Milo got used to them, but he soon found a stroke that suited him. In a steady rhythm, he gathered himself forward into a hunch, then stretched out and opened his long form. Another forward hunch, another long, taut form. He was more beautiful than any man whom Jacob could have hoped to take to bed in America.

  —You can do it so well, Jacob said. —Why didn’t you want to row?

  —I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to think, that you are like other travelers.

  —I’m not.

  —You are. You’ll ride away, Milo said, somewhat challengingly. —But don’t be sad, he added.

  —I’m not, Jacob denied. —Attention.

  “Jejeje,” Milo exclaimed. They were passing under the Mánes Bridge so close to one of the piers that Milo had to lie on the oars quickly to swing them inside the skiff. They waited to hear if the skiff would scrape the pier; no scrape came. As they were gliding away, Jacob reached out a hand and was able to touch one of the bridge’s black stones, slippery with algae. It didn’t have any smell.

  Milo recovered his rhythm. —Where shall we dine? he asked. —U ? Jacob had taken him there a few times when they had found themselves downtown at the end of the day, and they had liked sitting quietly in a corner of the genial roar.

  —I have a date, said Jacob.

  —Truly?

  He ought to have mentioned it sooner. —At a synagogue, he explained. —A friend wants to show it to me. We can meet later, you and I. I’m sorry.

  —Perhaps I will have dinner with Father. I think, that he misses me.

  They were approaching the Charles Bridge. Milo had brought them far over to one side of the river, almost to the Malá Strana bank. In fact he seemed to be steering them into Malá Strana itself.

  —Where are you taking me? Jacob asked, with some concern.

  —To Venice.

  Most place-names in Czech were easy for a foreigner to recognize, but a few, like Benátky, the word for Venice, reminded one that the language was old enough to have come up with its own names for things. As the skiff approached the river’s edge, several of the orange and yellow palaces seemed gently to part, allowing an inlet of the river to continue between them. It was a canal.

  Where the Charles Bridge made landfall in Malá Strana, the castle drew eyes upward and few tourists walked to the edge of the bridge to peer over and consider its footings. Jacob and Milo were able to pass unobserved as the canal took them under one of the bridge’s last arches. Milo let the skiff coast. It nudged a few ripples into the surface of the water, which fluttered in patterns associated with those ripples and made trickling sounds as it rose and fell against the brick bases of the canal-side palaces. They were simple palaces with tall, regular windows. A family had hung its laundry from the balcony of one of them. The canal itself had no social significance. The palaces beside it faced away. Perhaps they faced children playing soccer in a carless street nearby, because fragments of excited children’s voices echoed along the chamber formed by the tall buildings and the water, though no children and no soccer could be seen. —This is beauty, Jacob said, as Milo pulled them through the green shadow of an overhanging tree. It wasn’t a very manly sounding thing to say.

  —I was never here before, Milo said. —Maybe I’ll carry you to the synagogue like a gondolier.

  He dipped the oars to carry them a little farther. The skiff passed under a stone footbridge. Jacob slid a foot forward to touch one of Milo’s bare feet. It became harder, the deeper they went, for the sun to find its way into the narrowi
ng space between the two sides of the canal. Trees heavy with greenery blocked much of what sun there still was, and it occurred to Jacob that he didn’t know the exact hour when the sun was going to set. He found that he didn’t want to go to the synagogue. He had liked the idea when Kaspar had proposed it, but now it was going to take him away from Milo, and he resented it. It felt willed rather than natural, like a project undertaken for self-improvement. Kaspar would forgive him if he didn’t show up. Kaspar would probably even invite him to come another time.

  —I have to go back, Jacob announced.

  Milo held the oars suspended a few moments. —You must, mustn’t you?

  If Jacob were to decide to stay here, it would be impossible for anyone to find him. Hounds in movies always lose the fox’s trail when they come to a river. The skiff could wobble in the green water all afternoon, into the evening, and he could make it up to Kaspar later. He could stay a little longer in Prague so as to have time to make it up to him. He could put off graduate school. He could ask Milo not to go to Karlovy Vary. They would find something to do for money. And for now they could stay in the skiff until the streetlamps clicked on and hummed and threw orange rays against the sky, the blue of which would by then have begun to darken.

  They were silent as Milo pulled the skiff back down the canal and out into and across the Vltava. Though the sun was still shining, they were conscious that the day was soon to end, and the chatter of the tourists on the bridge, brought to them by gusts of wind, sounded improvident and somehow dispiriting.

  * * *

  On the landing just outside the main doors of the Wilson train station, two young Romany men—a fiddler and an accordionist—played to no audience. They sat on lumpy canvas bags. The accordionist, who was singing, had balanced a still-burning cigarette on the edge of the black case for his instrument; between verses he took it up and drew a breath through it. The song was sad, and there was a sweet fullness to it, as if one could rest there if one could somehow manage to get inside. The musicians didn’t notice Jacob, and they didn’t notice Kaspar when he came out of the train station lobby.

  Jacob had arrived late, but Kaspar didn’t feel well enough to walk too quickly, and he disparaged Jacob’s apologetic wish to hurry. It wasn’t far.

  The interior was dim. After the door thumped shut behind them, they could hear words being spoken upstairs. Kaspar took from his shoulder bag a hand-knitted blue yarmulke, perfectly circular. Yellow flowers and white Hebrew letters had been stitched into it.

  “Should I have one?” Jacob whispered.

  “It is not necessary, I think,” Kaspar answered, putting his on.

  At the end of the antechamber Jacob found a basket of spare yarmulkes for guests. The fabric was dull and gray, and they were larger and floppier than Kaspar’s. Jacob unfolded one and laid it on his head, patting it nervously and hoping it would stay in place. Kaspar had fixed his to a lock of his hair with a paper clip.

  They mounted stairs in the corner of the building—slowly, for Kaspar’s sake—and found themselves ascending into a balcony arrayed with pews. The pews were set on a mild incline, like seats in a choir or in a theater’s mezzanine, so as to allow views of the central temple beyond and below the banister at the balcony’s front. At the moment, the main floor of the temple was empty. Only the lights in the balcony had been lit, illuminating slightly more than a dozen men and women in their fifties and sixties. In the first row of the balcony were standing two men, presumably rabbis, though neither wore ceremonial dress, only coats and ties. Into the larger volume of the temple behind the two officiants there fell fading daylight dyed blue by the stained glass of the windows, on which the names of donor families from the First Republic were painted in Czech and, to Jacob’s surprise, in German black letter. It was the first time Jacob had seen the script in Prague, outside of used-book stores.

  Hearing them enter, several worshipers turned, and one of them, a short, silver-haired man with steel spectacles, nodded and smiled when he recognized Kaspar, who bowed and murmured in reply.

  “He is a kind man,” said Kaspar, as he filed after Jacob into a pew. “He took me to hospital.”

  “Does he live near you?” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe so.”

  “Then how come he took you to the hospital?

  “I was bleeding. It was curious. I did not notice it myself, in the beginning.”

  “Where?”

  “It was from a cut, where they made an operation. Oh, you mean…It was here. In synagogue.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I suppose you may mention him here that way.”

  “We shouldn’t be talking. We’re interrupting.”

  “So, okay,” Kaspar said. He took a book of liturgy from the pew and handed it to Jacob, who opened it to a random page and began to listen strenuously, as if to atone by attentiveness for the casual attitude that Kaspar had induced him to fall into. “But I will say,” Kaspar added, “it is not possible, I do not think, to interrupt God.”

  It occurred to Jacob to spy out the page number that their neighbor’s liturgy was opened to. Noticing Jacob’s interest, the man inclined the book to him. Once secure in a page number, Jacob was able to focus on the page, and he saw that the prayers were for the most part in Hebrew, while the framing narrative was in Czech. A few of the Hebrew words sounded familiar, because when Jacob was a child, a friend studying for his bar mitzvah had taught him some. The sound, at any rate, was familiar, if not the sense, and certainly the liturgical tone was familiar, the same measured tone that Jacob had heard in the church that he had grown up in.

  He was startled, however, when one of the rabbis opened his palms and his mouth and sang. The man wasn’t a rabbi, Jacob realized; he was a cantor. His voice was clear and elegant. It was as sad and sweet as that of the Romany boy singing outside the train station. It had the same openness; it would have been easy to injure. The man sang alone and unaccompanied, though his manner suggested that he was a quiet, even a contained person. Jacob had the sense that the exercise of his gift required courage—that such a person would never have exercised his gift at all if he hadn’t innocently believed that God had entrusted it to him for use. What was unlike the tradition that had raised Jacob was the exposure of personal art in the cantor’s voice. It seemed risky to center worship on something so delicate and unreliable. It suggested to Jacob an awareness that the conversation the worshipers were attempting could fail.

  * * *

  In the Žižkov apartment, in a corner of the kitchen, there was a heavy apparatus that Jacob didn’t at first recognize: an unwieldy metal basin that housed two cylinders. Deep inside were black fan belts connected to a motor. A rubber hose came out of the bottom, as did an electrical cord with a plug. There was a control knob, but its face had long ago disappeared. When Jacob plugged the apparatus in, it hummed heavily. When he turned the knob, a rotor inside the larger cylinder jabbed back and forth; when he turned the knob farther, the larger cylinder stopped and the smaller one rotated, at a much higher speed. The whole thing was mounted on castors that were too gritted up to turn; it could, however, be dragged.

  It had to be a washing machine, Jacob decided. He looked up , the Czech word for “washing machine,” in a large, scholarly Czech-English dictionary that he had recently bought. “Twin-tub” was listed as an English equivalent. Jacob had never heard of a twin-tub, but the two cylinders seemed to confirm that he was looking at one. The next time he went to the grocery store, he bought detergent.

  He couldn’t tell where it was supposed to go. More bafflingly, he couldn’t see how to get water into the twin-tub. He tried slipping the end of the rubber hose over the bathtub’s faucet, like a sleeve over an arm, but water pressure kept popping it off, and he realized that the hose had to be for draining. Oops. He filled a couple of pots and poured water into the large cylinder by hand. It took a while.

  There were other quirks. The apparatus didn’t seem to have a time
r, so Jacob had to decide for himself how long to soak clothes, how long to let the large cylinder agitate them, and how many times to drain and refill when rinsing. Moreover, the agitation of clothes in the large cylinder—the “washing” aspect of the washing machine—was somewhat violent. The rotor churned despite the absence of a lid, and after the rotor tore one of his paisley shirts, he risked his fingers whenever he saw a shirt matting itself up into dangerous intimacy with the chunk-chunking blades. After one of his fingers was bruised, he found a stick of lumber and thereafter supervised the washing stick in hand, like a caveman over a cauldron.

  The second cylinder, which worked as a centrifuge, also proved temperamental. It could only hold two, at most three, items of clothing at a time. Whenever Jacob tried more, it either wobbled limply or, if it reached a high speed, became unbalanced and clanked with horrifically loud clanks against the outer basin. It was a chastening sound.

  Jacob was proud of his ability to figure the twin-tub out. And as the novelty subsided, he noticed that this pride was supplemented by a subtler one, a sort of boastfulness about the grotesquerie: the more backward the twin-tub was, the more authentic the difference of Jacob’s experience in Czechoslovakia. Expatriate’s vanity. But in the long run pride and vanity weren’t sufficient compensation for tedium. The twin-tub began to irritate him. It was loud. It mauled his clothes. It took most of a day to use.

  There was a public coin-operated Laundromat in Prague. It was run, rumor had it, by an American who had been flown to Prague by a fundamentalist Christian organization. The Christians had hired him to run an English-teaching program, the sooner to bring the Reds to God and capitalism, but he had defected once he had recognized the business opportunity that a nation without Laundromats represented. His prices were reasonable, but his business was located in the ambassador’s district, too far away from Žižkovižkov to be worth the trip.

  A Saturday morning came when Jacob had only dirty clothes and acutely resented the expense of his life that would be required to clean them. However unfairly, to himself as well as to Czechoslovakia, he began to think about how little time he had given to writing in the past year. Was it completely wrongheaded, completely unjust, to wonder if it was because daily life in Prague was so effortful? Carl had referred to thinking along such lines as “convenience theory,” the joke being that it was too self-regarding and smug, too obviously lacking the impersonality and flexibility of what counted as theory with genuine philosophers. Convenience theory didn’t really amount to much more than homesickness for capitalism and the ways that capitalism made smooth, and in acknowledgment of its limits, Jacob’s resentment began to take a merely personal form—to become understandable to himself as shame. The strange task of laundering his clothes in a twin-tub was one that he had chosen as a corollary of having chosen to live in an economy that had not yet gotten over the idea that everyone should be put continually to familiar trouble so that no one should ever have to be put to any new kind of trouble. Jacob could have sold himself in America for enough money to buy his way clear of such troubles, which were after all unfamiliar to him if not to Czechs and Slovaks, but he had felt that he would be soiled by such a sale. He had felt there to be something inside him too fine for compromise, so he had fled here, where no one knew how to buy that thing in him and where he had unawares thrown himself instead in the way of an existential danger new to him, the danger of wasting his energies on surmounting inconveniences. It was possible here to spend a lifetime on nothing more. What if the year that he had spent in this world had been a mistake? It had surely had an effect on him; maybe it had lowered his expectations of himself. When he returned to America, he would probably find that the people he had known in college had gotten ahead of him. They would have made some progress in the past year in passing through the nameless task that he had found so distasteful. What had he been doing instead? Someone like Kaspar could say that he had been saving his soul, but Jacob would never be able to convince himself of the materiality of any such claim in his own case. He was an American; Americans had no souls; at any rate they never pretended to be sensible of them. It was an implicit promise of the socialism dying in Czechoslovakia that money should stain no one’s spirit, and the part of Jacob that wanted to hold itself pure had been taken in by that promise, even though what had first attracted him to the country was its story of revolution—that is, its story of having at last given the lie to the changelessness that was purity’s complement. He had come here because he had heard that a false haven was vanishing, only to discover that in dying it still appealed even to him, a stranger, with sufficient strength that he, too, felt drawn to and then betrayed by it, so bitterly betrayed that now, although he knew it was vanishing, he felt eager for it to be stamped out of existence as cruelly and as quickly as possible.