Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  And write soon.

  s velkým srdcem,

  Melinda

  * * *

  Jacob considered calling Milo. He considered walking to Milo’s father’s apartment and surprising him. He was afraid that Milo might reproach him. He hadn’t really done anything wrong. He hadn’t meant to hurt him. He had just wanted to be alone for the day. He was afraid of not being able to explain himself. The wish for solitude had sneaked up on him. It was gone now, but he had to be careful—it would come back. From hour to hour, he put off calling, because when he tried to think of what he was going to say, his explanations were so elaborate that he worried that they would sound like a justification rather than an apology. He hesitated, though, to simplify them, because if he were to give up too much of himself, he would be returning under the cover of a lie, which he wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from tearing apart later. He wanted Milo to take him back, but it would be no good unless Milo understood—unless Jacob was able to stand up for himself or at any rate for the idea that he had been seized by on Saturday, which he was bound to be seized by again.

  There was a new pay phone, bright orange and open to the air, on the avenue next to the new bakery near Jacob’s apartment, and in order to force himself out of the mental circles that he was running in, Jacob ordered himself to leave the house and call Milo from the pay phone on his way to buying cornflakes. Twice he put his crown in to the pay phone’s slot and then, unsure of what to say, pressed a lever to retrieve it. The third time, though, he dialed Milo’s number. As the phone rang, he heard the coin descend into the heart of the machine.

  —Please, Milo answered.

  —Jacob here.

  —Well, clearly.

  —Are you angry?

  —So it’s not the end yet, Milo answered.

  Jacob felt a light panic; he hadn’t expected that they would come so quickly to the point. —I don’t want the end, he said. In saying this, he said more than he had meant to, as one often does in a language one doesn’t quite know, but he found that he wanted to be saying it. He was new to lover’s quarrels and unfamiliar with the way a possibility of loss pricks appetite. —I did incorrectly, he continued. —I think maybe, that I was rehearsing for being without you.

  —That’s a bit romantic.

  —But it’s silliness. If I’m going to have to go away, it would be better if I enjoy myself prettily with you as long as I can.

  —That’s some sentence. Did you rehearse?

  —I thought about it enough, Jacob admitted.

  —Well, that’s also a bit romantic. You don’t have a new lover?

  —No.

  —You can tell me. It’s normal.

  —But I don’t have, Jacob insisted.

  —Me neither, said Milo. —Until I go to Karlovy Vary, I think, that I don’t want another, he then added, as if, having obliged Jacob to make a confession, it was only fair play to make a return in kind.

  —I’m a little afraid of returning to capitalism, said Jacob.

  —Like everyone in Czechoslovakia.

  —Will you see a movie with me tonight?

  —Will we visit Václav?

  Later, holding Milo’s hand in the dark, Jacob felt that it was only in recovering it that he learned what he had been in danger of losing. The touch of Milo’s hand seemed to remind him of parts of himself that he had already begun to forget about.

  When the show let out, the streets were still light. As they crossed an avenue, Milo jumped and Jacob climbed over a set of red-and-white-striped metal railings, the kind meant to keep pedestrians from wandering across tram tracks, and in steadying himself as he stepped down, Jacob grabbed Milo’s shoulder and then took his hand and kept it. Men in Prague never held hands in public. Milo looked at him and accepted it. It was as if they were issuing a challenge to the city. Jacob felt bold and happy.

  —I’m liberating you, Jacob said unseriously.

  —Ježišmarja, but you’re a hooligan.

  * * *

  At an office that a Western airline had opened, where the Czech sales agents were already trained in the Western manner of patient, impersonal cheeriness, Jacob learned that the only planes to America that he could still afford departed from London or Paris. He had been hoping he would be able to go through Paris on his way back. Annie told him about a new private bus company, willing to carry people to France for more or less what a pre-price-liberalization, leftover-socialist train ticket had cost. He chose a departure date a few weeks away.

  He tapped a reserve of crowns and dollars hidden in his Bible. There were a few hundred crowns left over, and on his way to a Café, to meet and her friend for an English lesson, he stopped in a pet supply store and bought a new glass cage for Václav, who was still living in Henry’s soup tureen. He also bought a little exercise wheel. Both items had been made in China. The wheel had an aluminum frame but its tiny slats were made of light blue plastic.

  The edge of the cage dug into his side as he carried it down Celetná, and people stared as if they hoped to be able to see the living thing that belonged in it, though it held only the exercise wheel. It was odd to be buying a home for á at the end of owning him rather than at the beginning. Maybe he had done it because he felt bad about leaving the animal behind. It would make it easier to find someone to give Václav away to. He imagined that Milo would take him if no one else would, but he hadn’t asked yet.

  and her friend, whose name was Lucie, were sitting at their regular table. When he entered, they were speaking quietly and confidentially, their Turkish coffees already in front of them, as well as a plate of wafer cookies, most of which, he knew from experience, they would insist toward the end of the lesson that he eat.

  Lucie was a sort of elf. She squirmed, her teeth were slightly crooked, and her sharp cheekbones were often flushed. She was bolder than —she had been a protester, had once boasted on her behalf—and it sometimes seemed that learned mostly by watching Lucie learn; seemed distressed whenever it was her own turn to speak, and sometimes Jacob wondered if she continued the lessons out of concern for him rather than to satisfy any wish of her own—out of a tenderhearted fear, maybe, that he felt rejected by her family and a sense that it was her duty to prove that he hadn’t been. If so, then it was his duty to see to it that the lessons had a cash value. He was fairly conscientious about preparing them; he photocopied advanced drills from a newly printed textbook that he had borrowed from Thom; he clipped short articles out of newsmagazines to discuss. Because it was and Lucie he sometimes let himself carry out ideas that were a little silly.

  When noticed the exercise wheel inside the glass cage, she covered her mouth in amusement. —That is excellent, she commented in Czech.

  “Will Václav study with us today?” Lucie asked in English.

  “He already knows English,” said Jacob. “He hears it a lot at home.” He ordered his usual soda water.

  “Ah, the mouse is not there,” Lucie observed, as she looked at the cage more closely.

  “ ,” said, with mild indignation. “Je .”

  “Omlouvám se,” said Lucie.

  “English, English,” ordered Jacob.

  “He is not mouse,” repeated herself. “Is…”

  “Hamster,” Jacob provided. “A hamster.”

  “Is not a mouse,” said . “Is a hamster.” In Czech she softly cursed the English language’s perverse encumberment with not only definite but also indefinite articles. “But Václav,” she continued, resuming her tentative English, “has he not…a home…already?”

  “He lives in a pot right now,” Jacob confessed.

  “A pot!” exclaimed. —But you are horrible, she said, shaking her head. —Since April! It’ll be dark there.

  Lucie shrugged and said, “He’s a mouse,” taking Jacob’s side.

  —But he isn’t, insisted again.

  —I have bought him a home at the end of ends, Jacob said in his own defense. He switched back to English: “I had to buy him on
e, so I can give him away.”

  “Mmm,” began. She stared at Lucie blankly for a moment as if to draw from her the words she was looking for. “You don’t love Václav any more?”

  “I have to go back to America.”

  “That is sad,” matter-of-factly said.

  “When do you go?”

  He named the date he had chosen.

  “So, we have still several lessons,” Lucie said. “We must learn quickly.”

  “We must,” agreed.

  “Do you want Váaclav?” Jacob asked .

  “I?” she asked, pointing to herself, flustered as always when a question singled her out. For a few moments she made a show of considering the idea, looking first at one corner of the ceiling and then at another. She folded her hands. —No, I don’t want.

  “She does not want,” Lucie explained, with a sly smile, “how do you say, .”

  “Bindings?” Jacob guessed. “No, that’s not it.”

  “A child is one,” said Lucie. “A garden.”

  “Commitments,” said Jacob. “She doesn’t want any commitments.”

  —May I tell? Lucie asked , who rolled her eyes for an answer. “She is going to study at the faculty of law,” Lucie revealed.

  “Law school? ?”

  “I know!” said , nodding her head and then shaking it, as if she thought it was a great joke. “Law school! I! Can you believe?”

  “She must,” said Lucie. “It is a new world.”

  “And I will live at the school,” herself said.

  “In the dormitory?” Jacob asked.

  She threw up her hands at the prospect of incorporating such a word into her vocabulary, but she nodded.

  “And your parents?”

  “Mother is very sad.” She shrugged. It was the fate of mothers. “Father is nervous, as you know. They—ale ne, ale ne,” she broke off.

  “What?”

  She hesitated. “If I say, you must…?”

  “‘Be silent.’ ‘Not tell.’ I won’t tell. There’s no one I could tell.”

  “Yes?” said. Despite her loyalty she was eager to communicate her secret. “They want to send him to Kuala Lumpur.”

  “Jesus.”

  “First Warsaw, now Kuala Lumpur,” said , as if one exile inevitably deteriorated to another. She seemed to enjoy saying the Malaysian city’s name. “They say, he did well in Poland.” She shrugged again; her father’s equivocal success was as far beyond remedy as her mother’s sorrow. —It is fearful, fearful, she said in Czech, laughing blackly.

  “It could be exciting,” Jacob said, for the sake of politeness.

  “Could be,” replied , unfooled, with cool emphasis.

  They turned to their lesson.

  * * *

  For two days Václav ran on his new wheel incessantly. Once or twice, afraid that the animal was overdoing it, Jacob took the wheel out of the cage for a spell, but the creature seemed to be at a loss without it, and Jacob put it back. When Jacob woke up the third morning, he didn’t hear the wheel turning. He found the hamster bestilled, resting on its side in the curve of the toy.

  The timing was convenient. Had it really exercised itself to death? A warning to Americans, said Milo. Or maybe, Jacob speculated, there had been something toxic in the glue that held the cage together. Jacob emptied a pack of cigarettes and lifted the wheel up so as to be able to tip the hamster into the pack without having to touch its body. Once the two men had dressed, Jacob took a knife and spoon from the kitchen drawer, and they walked to the foot of the street, where a row of evergreen shrubbery kept citizens from approaching a fenced-off railroad track. While Milo stood guard, Jacob crouched and dug a hole under a shrub with the knife and spoon. When the hole seemed deep enough to deter a cat, Jacob laid the cigarette pack in. He scraped the dirt back over it with his shoes and stomped it down.

  —It is curious, this burying a pet, said Milo.

  —It’s the custom in the suburbs of America.

  —It’s a gentle custom.

  —We buried our dog in our garden, Jacob said, as if the memory was an explanation.

  Their plan for the day, a Saturday, was to see the exhibit in the Powder Tower where a couple of Milo’s photos were on display. By the time they reached Republiky, they were hungry, so they bought , or sugared , for a few crowns from a cart on the southwest corner of the square. The corner was unshaded, and they blinked in the glare as the vendor poured two thin pools of yellow batter onto his griddle, which was still shiny and steel gray at this early hour. As they ate, a dust of sugar fell on Milo’s shirt, an olive green one that Jacob liked because of a brass ring pull on its zipper. Milo fluttered the shirt to bounce the sugar off, but the oil on his fingers left a stain where he held the fabric. He swore, and in frustration he pulled the chest of the shirt up to his mouth and tried to suck the oil and sugar out of the cloth, thoughtlessly exposing the soft, pale column of his belly.

  —You’re crazy, said Jacob.

  —I know already, said Milo.

  Between the heat of the sun and the sugar in his blood, Jacob felt a little muzzy. It was just too much here, he thought to himself, looking around the square at the dark Renaissance gingerbread of the Powder Tower and at the pink Art Deco wedding cake of the Municipal House, with its muddy atlantes bent under iron-and-glass polyhedra. Were the polyhedra supposed to represent lights? Light didn’t weigh anything. To decide at the last minute to stay would be melodramatic. It would seem too much like being under the spell of something, too much like not choosing. It was how a drunk or a child might make a decision.

  An unmarked iron door in the side of the Powder Tower was ajar, and they climbed a narrow, winding stairway until they were the equivalent of four stories high. They stepped into a small, square chamber, the size of the tower’s footprint minus the defensive width of its walls. Tall, slender windows lit all four sides of the room. At the folding table customary at all exhibitions, a shy girl with heavy glasses was sitting with a pouch of cash, a roll of tickets, and a neat stack of posters. They paid her a crown fifty each for entry, and Jacob paid another twelve crowns for the poster, which reproduced a photograph within a photograph. The inner photo, a state portrait of Masaryk, the First Republic’s president, looking like Freud but without glasses, was printed in green. The photo that contained it was a crowd scene in Wenceslas Square, printed in pink. In the pink crowd scene, the green Masaryk photo was being waved like a flag. —THE PHOTOGRAPH IN REVOLUTION, read the title. Jacob rolled the poster up gently to avoid creasing it, unaware that it was going to be lost in the transatlantic mail a few weeks later.

  The heavy stones of the tower and the stillness of the air kept the chamber cool. They were too high up for more than a faint echo of the street’s noise to reach them. The exhibit was scheduled to close in a week, and except for the ticket seller, they had it to themselves.

  Milo, as a contributor, had attended the a month and a half before and he let Jacob lead the way. The images were arranged chronologically, beginning with the march on a Friday evening in mid-November that had begun the revolution. To honor a medical student mortally wounded during an anti-Nazi demonstration half a century earlier, the government had permitted marchers to climb to Nátodní that evening from the valley below it. After laying flowers at the national cemetery, the marchers had been emboldened by their own speeches and shouts—and no doubt by the recent sight of East Germans fleeing to the West through Prague’s West German embassy—to continue north along the river. They had turned right at Nátodní and had approached Wenceslas Square. Photographs showed Národní full of people with hectic faces—waving sparklers, shielding candles from wind, and carrying hand-lettered banners calling for freedom, democracy, and the end of the Communist Party’s political monopoly. At the end of Nátodní, the protesters had been met by a row of riot police. The police had been wearing white helmets and had been carrying clear Plexiglas shields the shape of coffin lids. A young woman had held out a carnation to an even
younger policeman, her blond hair as disorganized as the carnation’s frilly petals, his features as elegant, formal, and empty as the ribbed Plexiglas balanced on his arm. In front of the police barricade some of the protesters had set up a sort of garden of candles on the cobblestone; one of Milo’s snapshots had caught two young men holding four candles up to the lit cigarette of a third man, who was inhaling to kindle sparks. Soon after the shot was taken, the police had encircled a number of the protesters and forced them to exit single file through a narrow arcade, set off from the rest of the street by columns. As the protesters had passed through the arcade, a number of them had been singled out by the police for beatings.

  —Were you hurt? Jacob asked.

  —I wasn’t encircled, Milo answered. —I’m a homo. I was furt watching the police, what directions they were stepping in.

  —Were you afraid?

  —We were so aroused. There were thousands of us.

  —Were you angry?

  He paused. —You’re such a serious boy. He stared at one of the photos and held his breath, trying to recall what it had been like. For a moment Jacob had the impression that Milo might have stood in the street that night, at the foot of Wenceslas Square, in the pose that he was standing in now, his shoulders squared, his head a little hunched down. —Well, it was peculiar. It was rather that it was our turn.

  —What do you call this? Jacob asked, pointing to a banner in a photo.

  “Transparent,” said Milo.

  —Did you carry a transparent?

  —I was carrying a camera.

  The next few photos depicted a congeries of candles, flowers, ribbons, saints’ images, and fragments of clothing—not unlike a roadside shrine in America for the victim of an automobile accident.

  —This was in the arcade on Saturday night, the next night, Milo explained. —We thought, that someone had been killed.

  —Who?

  —Some student of mathematics. But he was in the countryside. It was a rumor.

  Jacob remembered Rafe saying that a story had been planted in the heads of the college newspaper editors.