Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

In a new private bakery, a block from where Jacob’s new tram let him off, he discovered cornflakes. Noticing a line in front of the bakery, he fell into it without knowing what it was for. The interior of the shop was trimmed with oak instead of the usual marbled white plastic. Wire baskets held golden loaves and batons; crumbs littered a blue tile floor. The cornflakes were on a high shelf behind the counter, facing out, ranged in a row like a boast.

The red-and-white packaging was in German, but the photograph on the box fronts was unmistakable. For camouflage — almost as a decoy — Jacob first ordered half a dozen rohlíky . Then, as politely as he could, he asked if the miss wouldn’t mind also adding to his order one of those krabice there, if they were in fact for sale. They were, she conceded, and within twenty-four hours he had eaten all of one box’s contents. He bought two more boxes the next day. He then rationed himself, but not very strictly, and his appetite so alarmed the shop assistants that one at last asked him, incredulously, what by god he did with so many kornfléky . — I eat them, he admitted giddily. It was like saying he ate gold.

He was unabashed now. It was what he had learned from Carl and Melinda, he felt, and he thought of himself as carrying the lesson with him under his shirt, in the form of Carl’s pendant. He was still pursuing his original search, but he saw now that he had to go about it with a certain selfishness, which, if pursued purely enough, would turn out to be something more than selfishness in the end, he hoped. The new approach was reinforced by the knowledge that he was going to have to leave Prague by the end of the summer. He had been admitted to graduate school, and he had decided to go. Any pleasure he took, therefore, he was going to have to take with a necessary cruelty, with an implicit farewell, with the foreknowledge that it was only for the moment that he took it at all.

The Žižkovižkov apartment restored to him a solitude like the one he had known before Carl’s arrival. Though the building was much larger than the Stehlíks’—a proper apartment building rather than a villa — he never met anyone on the stairs or in the hallways. He returned to noticing such things as the sound of his own footfalls and the breath of air that cushioned a room when he first walked into it. He noticed the click of the bolt in its latch. If he wanted to, he was free to sit in the bedroom and watch a breeze toss the gauzy curtains quietly against the glass of the folded-open window. He didn’t have to come up with words for any of his thoughts; there was no one to convey them to. The window faced south, and after lunch he sometimes set a chair in front of it and read in the sun, putting his feet up on the radiator, which was quiet by day though it sometimes clanked to life for an hour or two in the evening.

The apartment had a large, old wooden console radio, whose FM dial was orthodoxly limited to the Communist-approved frequencies, a few dozen megahertz lower than those on which Western Europe broadcast, or America for that matter. While Jacob cooked and ate dinner, he left it on, so as to give himself the sound of company. Sometimes, if he wasn’t making any effort to pay attention, patches of the Czech state radio news tumbled comprehensibly into his mind.

He listened from the bathtub, too. On Mondays he always took a bath before dinner, because on Monday at eight p.m. the hot water stopped flowing and didn’t come back on until Thursday at the same hour — a shortcoming that the landlord had disclosed during negotiations but which Jacob hadn’t quite believed in at the time. The neighborhood’s hot water piping was undergoing repair. On weekdays, he rose early in order to have time to boil water, pot after steaming pot of which he poured cautiously into the tub and then diluted from the tap.

As he perched on the edge of his tub one morning, combing the water with his fingers to mix the cool into the hot, and as birdsong peppered the morning air, it occurred to him that he didn’t expect to remember the Žižkovižkov apartment as clearly as the Stehlíks’. He didn’t have the sense that he was memorizing it. The weakness of his attention may have had something to do with the season, late spring, when one begins to forget how rare, in the longer sweep of the year, a pleasant day actually is and then even to forget to reproach oneself for failing to bear the rarity in mind.

* * *

Thom and Henry found a new haunt for the friends, a cavernous hall set deep in the basement of a postwar white marble building, otherwise deserted, at the upper end of Wenceslas Square. The hall had been rented by a square-dancing society, which sold tickets and beer to the general public, and a hand-painted banner across the entrance declared the hall, in English, to be the Country Club. The beer was cheap, the fiddling sharp, and the dancing sweaty. Mostly the friends drank, talked, and smoked at the club’s long tables, though sometimes they rose and jogged around on the sidelines. Now and then Annie was even able to persuade them into a more serious imitation of square dancing, in time to the music and in a simple four-four step. She and Henry hadn’t become a couple, but she retained a hold on him sufficient to oblige him to participate in such experiments, and she had always been able to browbeat Thom and Jacob. In the aftermath of Carl and Melinda’s defection, the boundaries of their circle had loosened, and they were joined on most nights by a few of the shorter-term expatriates who, in Carl’s wake, seemed to be drifting into the city in greater and greater numbers. In the post office one day, Thom recognized a young woman he had known at school — Elinor, who had what the British called ginger hair. Immediately upon Thom’s introduction of her at the Country Club, she was secured by Annie as an ally. Another new regular was Vincent, a young Tory with thick black curls and full lips, whom no one ever seemed to have invited but who insisted on showing up anyway, attracted by the pleasure of inserting himself into the conversation whenever it turned to intellectual matters. To Annie’s disgust, Vincent’s arguments contained frequent and apparently unconscious allusions to his family’s wealth and to the education that had been purchased for him with it. His accent, too, dismayed her, for reasons that Jacob was too American to appreciate: his vowels were boxy and inward, his consonants mildly slurred. Henry was willing to be debated by him, but Thom found him insufferable and Hans called him the class enemy to his face. Jacob, however, quietly supported his presence, with motives he knew to be low. Vincent was a beauty, and his arrogance reminded Jacob of Daniel’s, though it was clumsier — it was nature where Daniel’s was artifice. Jacob’s support irritated his friends, who regarded it as a lapse in judgment if not taste, but the defections had left Jacob impatient with the compromise he had struck with himself in the fall.

This impatience eventually led him into adventures. He refused to go back to T-Club, but one night, after parting from his friends at the door of the Country Club, he waited until they were out of sight and then walked to Letná, the park around Stalin’s monument where Henry had once reported seeing men cruising. There, in the shadows, Jacob looked into the faces of circling men, as if in search of something. If he was trying out the role of outlaw, it would be wrong to be looking for approval, but before he could unravel this train of thought, he was nodded at by a wiry, birdlike man, who on closer approach proved to have fine hair and delicate features and to be only a few years older than Jacob himself. The man was too well dressed to be Czech, and he admitted in nearly faultless English to having come that morning from Vienna, though properly, he said, he belonged to Malta, since he was a knight of Malta.