Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“A knight?” Jacob asked. They were half whispering.

“It is a form of rank,” he replied, putting on the sort of modesty that Jacob’s Harvard classmates had used when telling outsiders that they went to school “in Boston.” “And you are from the great republic. May I?” He interlaced the fingers of one of his hands with those of Jacob’s and playfully pulled Jacob toward him. “I have a great desire to.” They kissed for a while. “Shall we go to where I am staying? It is only a few steps from here.”

It was somewhat more than a few steps, but the knight paid for the taxi. En route he caressed the underside of Jacob’s forearm, invisible to the driver, and cautioned Jacob that they would have to enter the building where he was staying in absolute silence. It wasn’t his apartment. He swore Jacob to secrecy (“you are now on your honor, you understand”) and explained that he had come to Prague on business for the church (which? solemnly: “Rome”). There was an understanding between the church and the knights of Malta, an old alliance against atheism, socialism, and other such forces in the world. Though the Communists had forbidden monastic life, a few heroic men had persevered, even in Prague, and had taken vows and lived in secret accordance with them, unknown to the civil authorities. Did Jacob know of this? The pope himself had granted these men their dispensation; their apartments became their cells. It was to such a cell that Jacob and the knight were traveling. The church had offered the empty bed of a monk now on a pilgrimage to Rome — a monk’s property, after all, was at his church’s disposal — in consideration of negotiations that the knight was to make in Prague on the church’s behalf. The apartment’s second monk — two lived there — was also scheduled to be away, though only for the night, and to make sure that he was in fact away, it would be more prudent if the knight entered the rooms first alone. It was preferable if Jacob could omit to notice the location of the apartment, and he must promise, if he did take note in spite of himself, never to return. He must never speak to the monks. They were under orders. They were not to know that Jacob had ever visited. Their apartment was, after all, tantamount to a monastery. It was wonderful to have such a place, the knight continued after a momentary pause. He looked very much forward to Jacob’s fucking him there.

“Are you a monk?” Jacob asked.

“I am a knight.”

“That’s right,” said Jacob.

They stopped at a gray building across the street from a steep, wooded hill. Wordlessly they climbed to the top floor. The apartment was spare and simple. The knight declined to turn on a light, but on the mantel, a crucifix under glass glowed a delicate electric blue, and by its light and that of the streetlamps outside, Jacob saw that the mantel also held a bottle of water, labeled in Czech script as blessed by the pope; a framed postcard of an Italian painting of the Virgin Mary; a wooden rosary wrapped around a white statuette of Jesus; and a jar of earth, labeled as having come from the Holy Land. A part of Jacob may have felt a little sorry, but another part was happy to be a little brutal. There were twin beds, somewhat austere, and onto one of them the knight pulled Jacob and there unbuckled Jacob’s belt. “Will you make use of this? I want it very badly. Or rather, not it, but what I would like you to use it with.” The condom proved troublesome afterward, when Jacob thoughtlessly flushed it, causing the knight to worry that it might stop up the plumbing and be discovered during repair. His concern was so vivid as to suggest it might have happened to him once before. “It is not for me that I fear, but there should not be questions for the monks.”

Thus ended Jacob’s half year of abstinence. After breakfast, the two walked around downtown while the knight indicated buildings that the church intended to reclaim. “Do you see that rectory? In any case it will soon be a rectory again. I am speaking to a member of Parliament about it tonight.” The knight’s other hobby horse in conversation was the freemasonry, as it were, of nobles, which he extravagantly praised. Crossing , he became excited upon recognizing two tall, middle-aged German tourists, whom he identified as a count and an earl. “Now you will see, ” the knight whispered to Jacob. When hailed, the Germans, polite and cautious, spoke in English as a courtesy to Jacob, whose presence the knight left unexplained. The men showed no sign of knowing that they belonged to a secret club that ruled the world. “They didn’t say anything about it,” Jacob commented after the tourists had parted from them.

“Ah, but they wouldn’t. They needn’t, you see. We recognize one another.”

“It’s like being gay.”

“Not at all.”

“You have a society right under the noses of a society that doesn’t see you.”

“But it’s very different. The matter is entirely different.”

It occurred to Jacob that the Germans’ courtesy might have been the sort extended to an acquaintance known to be harmless but delusional. By midafternoon, as the knight’s supposed appointments with government officials approached, Jacob found himself exhausted, and it was a relief that the knight’s instructions for a reunion in Vienna (“It will be pointless to ask for me by name at this address. Ask the housekeeper rather for the gentleman visiting in the rooms of the lawyer Detlev Bachofen; I am always to be found in his rooms on Thursdays at five o’clock. We shall have a whole evening together of delightful fucking”) were too cloak-and-dagger to bother remembering, though the fiction of a future rendezvous did make the moment of farewell carefree.

Jacob’s other adventure was less mysterious. The pages torn from his gay travel guide listed a café attached to a Wenceslas Square hotel, which he hadn’t yet visited because the location was so public and because a coffee there cost as much as a meal elsewhere. Out of options, he steeled himself one afternoon. He took a seat in the café’s second-floor balcony, which discreetly overlooked the main floor, amid waiters’ knowing looks and the enveloping dull bronze and red serge of tourist’s art deco. Older men sipping nearby queried him with surreptitious glances, and he felt saved from them when a skinny young man with dyed blond hair walked over and after a brief pretense of needing to borrow matches sat down to flirt in earnest. He was twenty-two; he was a pastry-cook’s apprentice; he loved Americans. Not long after, he and Jacob were rolling in bed together at Jacob’s apartment. They had sex and then, because there was nothing to talk about, had sex again. Idly, postcoitally, the man regretted the ugly furnishings that had come with the ižkov apartment and began to propose colors and designs to replace the sheets and curtains. Jacob was entertained until the man said that next time he came he would bring his mother’s plates, which were much prettier than Jacob’s. He thought he was moving in, Jacob realized with alarm. Jacob disillusioned him; for good measure he invented dinner plans that required an immediate parting. The man looked stunned but said that he understood. He added that he hadn’t expected Jacob to be such a person. Jacob shrugged.

* * *

Since his first day in Prague, Jacob had been going into bookstores. He picked books up from their tables nervously and greedily, pronouncing in his head the authors’ names, which he didn’t recognize, and the words in the titles, which he didn’t understand, trying to gauge literary value by the quality of paper, binding, and design. He held them under false pretenses — he couldn’t read; he merely wanted to — and he was afraid in early visits that a sales clerk might offer to help him choose or might try to draw him into a literary conversation. In those days, however, sales clerks in Prague rarely spoke to customers unless they had to. Jacob’s disingenuousness was never exposed; it was able to ripen in time into something more ambiguous.