Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

In the Jewish cemetery, the grass had been trimmed only in the first row of graves, those fronting the street. Jacob walked along it. Behind the irregular palisade of headstones, there were green shadows carpeted with vines. Scrub trees shot up and struggled to pierce the canopies of older trees, which kept out the sun.

At the end of the row, Jacob recognized the angular white stele of Kafka’s grave from a biography he had read. A little mess of ferns had sprouted at its base. He stared absentmindedly at the cleared square of white gravel that the stele rose from. Had he expected to feel something here? He remembered the first sentence of “The Metamorphosis,” but it was a strange thing to think of saying at a person’s grave, from which a person would never awake and where one changed into…what? Kafka had been buried with his parents. Jacob wondered if it had bothered Kafka to know that he was leaving them with the burden of burying him.

Jacob took a few steps into the relative wilderness behind the grave. The disorder seemed to represent what Prague really thought of the writer — what it would have expressed if the visits of tourists didn’t constrain it. Jacob had the feeling of standing behind stage, in a place where no care had been taken about lines of sight. Weeds curled up the front of gravestones whose backs, because they faced Kafka, had been kept clear. A certain protection was nonetheless afforded, even on the lee side of sightlines, by proximity to the writer’s grave, and as Jacob walked farther away from it, he had the sense of wading into a sea. Bland, dark leaves hid first the footpaths and then the slabs that sealed the graves. In the deepest rows, ivy shrouded headstones as tall as Jacob was, fat leaves nodding here as everywhere with inoffensiveness and complacency. Young trees seemed to pry headstones from their bases, and older ones seemed to rummage with their roots, though the dislodging and the rifling were taking place with a peaceful, immemorial slowness. Was it upsetting, if there was no one alive to be upset by it? It wasn’t accurate to call the process decay, because it was after all life. If you thought your death could be a gift, this is what you thought of, not the neatness of a tended grave but the abandon of a forgotten one, where there isn’t much distinction between one grave and another, and with the passage of time less and less difference between having lived and not having lived.

He pulled himself out of the vines impatiently.

* * *

— Here the American prepares the water for his bath.

— But wait.

— That isn’t a bother. Leave it. This is documentary. How many pots are you boiling, Mr. American?

— Four. My hamster lives in the fifth.

— We are here witnesses of history.

— Will you be a participant?

— I’m the documentarist.

— Naked documentarist.

— So that I do not frighten the native.

— Will they print these photos?

— I’ll print them.

— You know how?

— I photographed on Václavák during the revolution.

— Truly? You’re a photograph?

— Photographer, Milo corrected.

— Photographer. I want to see your photographs.

— They’re at Dad’s. Hey, you’re boiling.

— Attention, Jacob warned.

— He puts on his Czech underwear. Normally he is furt naked, this native. Mr. Native, why Czech underwear?

The boxers were striped red and white like peppermint candy. They held Jacob only loosely and went no lower than his crotch. He had to crumple the fabric down when he puts his pants on over them, or they would ride up too high.

— Normally these aren’t to be seen. The American ones wore out.

— You lost them.

— In the Czech forest.

— The American pours the hot water into his tub. The American must be strong in order to carry his pots.

— When can I see the photos? Jacob asked.

— One or two are on exhibit at the Powder Tower. The American sweats in his labor. He reddens from the heat.

— Are you coming in with me? Jacob asked, running a little of the cold water now.

— It will be quite splendid, I think, this documentary of the American in Prague and his pots of hot water.

— Are you coming in?

— That one they certainly won’t print.

— Are you coming?

— Wait, wait, said Milo, putting his camera aside.

* * *

On bright days, now, most of the streets of the district were lively with tourists even in the early morning. Charles Bridge, however, drew so many of them away, to the far side of the river in pursuit of the castle, that in north of the bridge one felt their absence. Along the avenues, large unimaginative administrative buildings sat mysteriously silent, their doors still, their shades drawn against the sun. Perhaps they had once been filled by government planning agencies. One morning Annie led Jacob down the neighborhood’s empty walkways toward the river.

“They’re this way,” she said, once they came to the water. “Just a few meters on, I believe.”

Below, flashing with reflection, dimples scissored themselves in and out of existence.

“Have you been in one yourself yet?” Jacob asked.

“That’s just it. What if I were to fall in? Do you think the Czechs would rescue me?”

“You think I will?”

“Oh, you’re the sort. Though you might be quite tiresome about it after. Come to think of it I expect you would be.”

“I fell into the Charles once,” he remembered.

“You can swim, then.”

“It wasn’t over my head, where I fell in. Just to my knees.”

A gangway of whitewashed plywood rested on the stone wall that hemmed the river. With the swell of the river the gangway very gently seesawed, rising and falling like a sleeper’s torso. Annie and Jacob walked down it to a moored barge. A second gangway led them down to a floating dock. Half a dozen skiffs were lashed to its sides.

They were welcomed somewhat skeptically. Jacob had to promise the man in charge that they knew how to row before the man was willing to take twenty crowns, untie a skiff, and hand Jacob its painter. Annie clambered into the stern. When Jacob followed, the boat swiveled dangerously until he realized he should crouch down. Seated facing her, he drew the oars up from between his legs. Once he had figured out how to hold them, he set the tip of one oar’s blade against the little dock and shoved them off.

They drifted for a moment. The nose of the skiff had been pointed upriver, toward the Charles Bridge to the south, but the current soon caught the nose and the skiff yawed clockwise, into the middle of the river, until Jacob, realizing that he now had enough sea-room to swing the oars freely, pulled on them and righted the skiff so that it once more stemmed the stream.

Effortfully they climbed the river. The bright air around them was silent except for intermittent clumsy splashes that he made with the oars. The rowing took more strength than he had imagined it would. He began, however, to find a rhythm. They were far below the level of the city where they usually walked. The tall, mud-gray stone of the embankment seemed to be sheltering them.

“It’s quite lovely, isn’t it,” said Annie. “I knew it would be.” She brushed the hair from her forehead and blinked her eyes shut for a moment in the sun, appreciating its warmth.