Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They demanded drinks, perhaps as a pretext for shaking themselves a little free of the demanding crowd, and suddenly everyone in the room felt the need of drinks, and the press of people shifted to the kitchen. Then Henry was obliged to give Melinda a tour of the other two rooms, accompanied again by more or less everyone, though most had already seen them.

“But where are your shirts, Jacob?” Melinda wheeled on him in the living room to ask. “Henry told me the other day that it was like a meadow in bloom here, they were so brightly colored and tossed about with such abandon.”

“That was only so they could dry,” Jacob said.

“And now you’ve put them away. Shame. Is this where you sleep?” she asked, taking a seat on the sofa. She idly smoothed the Indian print that they had found under Henry’s bed and spread over the sofa a few hours before. “Must we have that light, do you think?”

Kaspar, who was nearest, flipped a square plastic switch in the wall, and the bulb winked out, leaving them no more than the yellow that spilled over the lintel from the kitchen and the orange that came brokenly through the windows from the streetlamps outside.

The obscurity seemed to discontent Hans, who asked, “And what is the occasion for this party?” in a voice a little too loud and slightly petulant, as if he had been brought into this ambiguous room against his better judgment.

“Departure,” Melinda told him.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Carl explained.

“To return to the land of the Great Satan,” Hans inferred.

“Gently now, gently,” Thom advised.

“I’m going to the land of the Great Cannoli, actually,” Carl replied.

“I’m taking him to Rome,” Melinda disclosed.

“ You are?” Thom queried.

“We’re running off,” she said.

“Is cannoli too North End?” said Carl. “Maybe they don’t even actually have cannolis in Rome.”

“They have cannoli in Rome,” Henry confirmed from the doorway.

There was a silence as their other friends took in the news.

“Did you know of this, Henry?” Thom asked.

Henry shook his head.

“Did you, Annie?”

“Melinda told me this morning, as it happens.”

Now Thom shook his head. “You’ll be sorely missed. I know Jana will be sorry she had no chance to raise a glass to you, so I’ll take care to raise twice as many meself.”

“That is kind of you,” Melinda said.

“Goodness,” Thom added, mostly to himself, and again shook his head.

“Is Rafe aware of your plans?” Henry asked.

“Wasn’t too keen on them,” Melinda replied.

“Mmm.”

A song ended, and in the silence that followed, a little longer than it needed to be in accordance with the casual way the tape had been mixed, the foreknowledge of what they would be to one another even after they had parted seemed to well up and become stronger in each one, perhaps because the parting was imminent, perhaps because they had been reminded of Rafe’s unhappiness, perhaps because of an awareness that Carl and Melinda would carry off with them a piece of what they had all shared.

Pale Hans shifted restlessly.

“How much longer will you stay, Hans?” Melinda asked.

“I cannot bear to stay here for much longer.”

“Hans is, like you, one of the last Communists in Czechoslovakia,” Melinda told Kaspar, who was sitting beside her on the sofa. “As yet unrecalled by your national committees.”

“Oh yes,” Kaspar said. He had heard of Hans. Afraid perhaps that Melinda gave too much credit to himself and too little to Hans, Kaspar added, “I am only a new, how do you say, a new disciple.”

“A convert,” Jacob suggested, prompted by his habits as a teacher.

“Yes, that is the word, a convert.”

“It surprised you perhaps, that your precious Havel could do such things,” Hans said.

On Kaspar’s face appeared in reply the mild and quizzical look that had so often irritated Jacob and now had a similar effect on Hans.

“Dollar for dollar,” Hans continued, “nothing that Honecker ever did amounted to so great a crime.”

From the reference to the East German leader, it was evident that Hans, on his side, had also heard of Kaspar.

“Is it in dollars,” Kaspar replied, “that one should measure?”

“What other way, in this world?” Hans asked. One could hear from the way his words were formed that his mouth was twisted in disgust, though it was too dark to see such a detail. “These ‘liberals’ will give away industries made by the people, owned by the people — give them away! To sell them would be foolish enough.”

“Aren’t they giving them to the people?” Jacob asked.

“You believe that. Have you talked to the people?”

“People seem a little confused, but I haven’t talked to very many about it,” Jacob admitted.

“When the people are confused it is no accident,” Hans said. “Someone wants them to be. Someone arranges it!”

He was shouting. Thom, who was standing beside the boom box, bent his knees so as to slide down the wall he was leaning against, and with a comic pretense of imagining himself unobserved, turned up the volume to match that of Hans’s voice. Once a few people had chuckled, he scooted down the wall a second time to turn the volume down again.

“You oughtn’t to attack Kaspar,” Annie said. “He’s likely the only one here who agrees with you.”

“My chemists say they don’t know what they’ll do with their coupons,” Jacob volunteered. “These chemists I teach. And they all have PhDs.” If he was willing to concede a few points, maybe it would be harder for Hans to turn the conversation into a fight. “But the reforms have to be done quickly, after all.”

“Quickly, yes,” Hans replied, “before the people have a chance to give it thought. Crisis — the midwife of capitalism. The ‘advisers’ arrive and say, My god, they have no predatory class here. It is an emergency! We must create one immediately. Let us arrange to give everything to a few crooks. Then this country, too, will have a mess of parasites to rule it, to suck the value of the people’s labor.”

It was as if Hans were releasing a wasp into the room in the hope that someone would volunteer to be stung. For a few moments none of the partygoers moved or spoke, lest the wasp should land on one of them. Hans shook his head, as if giving up on them, and they sensed that the danger was passing — that the wasp was flying away and out the open window, as it were.

How tiresome that rigmarole is, thought Jacob. He drank a few times from his beer, and it occurred to him that he hated being compelled to think of ideas on a night when he wanted to think of his friends, especially when the ideas seemed to have in them nothing of the texture of what he had experienced with his friends. Jacob didn’t know anything about economics; in America, a person with his ambitions, or lack of them, almost never did. In the British newsweekly he liked to read — once again the only English-language magazine available on Prague newsstands, now that the American competitor that had come with the war had gone with the peace — Jacob found the editors’ confidence in their economic convictions appealing, though he hardly understood the grounds for them. “You’ve been reading it altogether too much,” Daniel had once teased him, back in Boston; “you’re starting to believe that the problems of the world all have solutions.” Understanding the world’s problems had been Daniel’s forte; it wasn’t Jacob’s. For all Jacob really knew, Hans was right. After all, there was something economic about the freedom that he had experienced here, and the matter had to lie deeper than the currency exchange rate, so favorable to Western visitors, because people like Annie and him felt it even though they lived for the most part on their salaries in crowns. Jacob had never felt anything like it before. Maybe it was an aftereffect of Communism, but he preferred to think of it as an aspect of transition — of conditions changing so quickly and at so many levels that no one had yet figured out how to use them to separate people from the easy things that made them happy. What it felt like, practically speaking, was that one looked forward in the morning to the events of the day for themselves — to riding the rickety, musical tram, or to drinking a beer with friends. One did not think about getting through the day, or about winning anything with the use of it — there was no idea of losing the day as if in trade for something else. It was lost innocently, for nothing. But this quality of loss would have to be lost, in turn.