Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— No, Jacob answered. It occurred to him that he was entitled to feel angry, but he felt only puzzled. He drank quietly from his beer and cast his thoughts back, as one does when one has been fooled, to see whether in his excitement he had revealed more than he would have liked to.

“I’m sort of a weeper, aren’t I,” he said out loud in English, more to himself than to Luboš.

— Pardon?

“And you’re sort of an asshole.”

Luboš smiled. — You were very sad, he said. — It was good of you to be so sad.

Jacob saw that he had been expected to respond differently. When he and Luboš lay down for the night, they kissed quietly for a while, and in the end, because Jacob very much wanted to, they did make love, safely, as Jacob had learned to do in Boston, where the few men that he had gone to bed with had all followed the rules without prompting.

* * *

In the morning, he didn’t want to look at Luboš. In those days, he often felt shy with the other person after spending the night, whether it was with a man or a woman. It was a reaction he had no control over, like the kick of a gun. He stiffly offered to share his rohlíky , butter, and strawberry jam. He hated himself for his reserve, but he didn’t know how to soften it. He tried to disguise it by telling Luboš to feel free to take a shower, but then he spoiled the invitation by adding that he had to shower himself and had to be at the school in an hour, so Luboš did not accept.

— I am glad, that we met, Luboš said at the door.

At least Jacob thought that’s what he said; he wasn’t sure he understood the last word, but he didn’t ask about it, because he was looking forward to being alone. In the daylight Luboš’s face seemed older, uneven. Jacob didn’t understand why he had been drawn to it. He knew, however, that he would be drawn to it again when this mood wore off. He tried to keep that in mind. — I, too, he answered. There was something that his struggle with himself was distracting him from. There was a nuance he was missing. He tried to force his attention. He remembered that he had no way of contacting Luboš. —Telephone? he asked.

This time Luboš supplied a number. It belonged to a friend, he said, with whom they could leave messages. There seemed to be nothing else to say. They embraced quickly, for a leave-taking, and the smell of Luboš, rising off his body as they touched, first disgusted Jacob, then melted him, the second response succeeding the first almost instantly, disorientingly. This was the body he had been lying next to, the aroma reminded him, with whom he had taken a simple pleasure. He had somehow forgotten it upon waking up.

* * *

“I just had the most disturbing experience,” Annie said in a hushed voice, about a week later, as Jacob sat down at her table in a café in , or Old Town Square. It was midafternoon, and the square, which they had a good view of through the café’s windows, was nearly empty. It was too cold for tourists. Not long ago, a gold-colored statue of an East German car on legs had seemed to stride into the square, in the corner marked by the Staré horologe, but the statue had recently been taken down. What’s Your Hurry? had been the name of it. There no longer seemed to be any hurry at all, only gray bricks and a few wanderers, leaning into the wind as they walked.

Jacob looked around for clues.

“You’re welcome to the rest of my cake,” she said, misunderstanding his glances.

“No thanks. What happened?”

“Do you see your man there, by the bar?”

“My man?”

“Not literally yours, Jacob, at least not to my knowledge. The sharp one. Don’t look now. Youngish, dark hair, wool sweater, a bit naff. Don’t look I said.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sitting here, with my dort and my sodovku , writing a letter to my mother, quite innocent and respectable, and he comes over to my table. Uninvited, but quite nicely put together, I thought at first. I could tell he was an American. He asks for a cigarette and says he’s in Prague for a few days, what should he see? I don’t know, I tell him. The bridge, the castle.”

“Sounds innocuous.”

“But he becomes very inquisitive when he hears that I teach here. Asks how much am I paid. Is that polite in America? He starts naming figures, in dollars. I explain that my salary is set by Czech law and that it’s in crowns. And he points to my chocolate cake and says, ‘Can you afford that?’”

“Was he joking?”

“I don’t think so. I ask what he does for a living, and I believe the word he used was ‘I-banker.’ ‘Can you afford that ?’ I say. And he gets quite hot under the collar. Tells me he came to Czechoslovakia to get away from that kind of ‘self-hatred,’ that was his word. He wanted to visit a place where they welcomed free enterprise and were grateful for it. I said, I work for the state and wouldn’t know anything about that. And he becomes quite threatening, with this booming voice — you’re too refined to boom, Jacob, but I find that Americans often have a talent for it—‘ You will.’ And he stalks off like a little tin soldier.”

“He’s cute, though,” Jacob observed.

“He isn’t. He’s nondescript, really.”

“I think he knows we’re talking about him.”

“Does he? It’s of no concern to me.”

Jacob was out of things to read in English, and Annie had offered to show him a lending library that the British, during the Communist era, had set up in a corner of the Clementinum, a former Jesuit compound that now belonged to Charles University. To hide from the wind, they took a back route, down an alley that felt like a tunnel, past a Renaissance church with boarded-up windows, crumbling in on itself like an abandoned tenement in a slum, past a wine bar they all liked, and then, beside a store selling accordions and flutes, which seemed never to be open, through a passageway and into a further maze of alleys.

“I had a date on Thursday,” Jacob volunteered, when they were close to a wall and safe from the wind.

“Did you.”

This hardly signaled that she wanted to hear more, but Jacob wanted to try to put the experience into words. He told her about going to Café Slavia. She knew and liked the café, she said; she liked all cafés, really. He was less successful at conveying the tender awkwardness he had felt when alone with Luboš. Moreover, when he related Luboš’s joke, she looked alarmed.

“That’s peculiar,” she said.

He found that he wanted to defend Luboš. “I think the Czechs have a darker sense of humor.” Maybe the dictatorship they had been living under had accustomed them to playing with a larger part of the self as if it were false.

“It’s possible,” she said, mildly.

The British library was up a flight of stairs in the northeast corner of one of the Clementinum courtyards. Inside, it looked like a library that a New England prep school might have built for itself in the 1970s — comfortable chairs of artificial leather, a beech-wood card catalog, and, along the walls, like carefully trimmed rosebushes, a hedge of waist-high bookshelves, a branch of which jutted into the room every few yards, like the tongue of a capital E.