Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

In the summer’s limit, Milo for his part seemed to see no more than a motive for bringing Jacob to experiences in Prague that Jacob had so far missed. At first he merely pointed out opportunities that Jacob was walking past unawares. Jacob was at this stage exploring Malá Strana in greater detail. He had neglected it because it lay on the far side of the river and a little too obviously in the way of the tourists who marched daily across the Charles Bridge to the castle, but he had come to feel that he ought to be bigger in spirit than to fear seeming like a tourist. Still, to distinguish himself from the tourists, he insisted on arriving in Malá Strana by a practical rather than a scenic route, rising into the district on the Malostranská subway station’s long, tedious escalator, two flights of which seemed to be permanently under repair, and then walking down a crooked alley, just as long and tedious if not quite as exhausting, that ran along the rear of several palaces and was lined on both sides with faceless concrete wall for most of its length.

— There are gardens here, do you know? Milo asked, the third or fourth time Jacob led him down the charmless alley. — Take a look. He nodded at a heavy, unlabeled door the size of a horse and carriage, with a smaller door the size of a person cut into it.

— This is allowed? Jacob asked, half to himself, as he pushed open the inner, person-size door. He saw a path of blue gravel crossing green lawn. He stepped carefully over the lower edge of the larger door that framed the smaller one.

The gardens were laid out in a seventeenth-century pattern. Stiff, calf-high hedges drew squares around green lawns and within the lawns drew circles around flowerbeds. The flowers themselves had gone past; no more than a few white petals were still scattered in the leaves of the plants, which in the lateness of the season had grown from beauty into mere health, monotonously and diffusely green, washing up lazily against the woody hedges that encircled and contained them. At the corners of the sectioned lawns, bronze statues were streaked somewhat wildly with white and green verdigris. Water jetted from a statue of a woman and child into a large basin.

— Is it pleasing to you? Milo asked.

— It’s excellent. We have to come back.

— But we are here now.

Maybe it was the mistaken impression that they had stumbled onto a secret that had caused Jacob to imagine that the point of the place was to come back to it later.

Two women sat gossiping on a stone bench in the shade while their children, elfishly thin, wearing nothing but underwear and sockless shoes, skipped from one hedged quadrant to another. The children had an inflatable red-and-white ball, and their game seemed to be to tag one another with it. It was so easy to dance away that in order to have any fun it was necessary for them to endanger themselves by coming needlessly close.

— They aren’t shy, said Jacob.

— Why would they be shy?

— In America, even children, if they are not clothed…

— But you’re not a Puritan, not you.

— No, Jacob admitted. — But you and I…, he continued, but he trailed off. He had been going to defend America’s morals, or lack thereof, by pointing out that on Prague’s subways and trams he and Milo allowed no more than the backs of their hands to touch, but the touch had become a habit and Jacob found that he would rather let his point go than cast a light on it in any way critical.

— Here you and I, said Milo, pointing at a bronze of two wrestling men. The figures didn’t seem to be Antaeus and Hercules — their four feet were planted on earth — but merely two Enlightenment gentleman-gymnasts, thick-muscled and delicately coiffed. Rain had blanched with verdigris the rippled chest of one of them, who stood upright, pushed slightly backward, exposingly, by his partner, who was bent over and was pulling toward him the upright man’s left thigh while pushing away his right shoulder. The upright man, who wore a trim moustache, looked down at the other with a look of concern, almost tender. A clean-minded viewer was supposed to understand that the statue represented the men just before the lower threw the upper off his balance, but as a statue the statue belied this interpretation, because it held them together eternally in poise, and where the lower man placed his hand on the upper one’s thigh, and the upper one placed his hand over that hand, it was just as possible to imagine that the pressure of the second hand was intended to confirm and hold that of the first one.

— Like this? Jacob asked, and he abruptly bent over, grabbed Milo’s thigh, and made as if to shove away Milo’s opposite shoulder. Milo caught Jacob’s two hands in his and under the cover of rough-housing jestingly tried to keep Jacob for a moment in the lower man’s crouch, which in the statue brought the lower man’s face suggestively near the upper one’s fig leaf.

— But be good, Milo said.

— Good for what? When Jacob recovered, he continued to study the statue, glancing at it over his shoulder as he tried now to adopt the posture of the upright man. Was that what he and Milo looked like? he wondered. Not: Did they look muscled and naked. Not that aspect but the other: Did they look balanced. Did they look like two men touching each other. Of course they did, but it was strange to think about it. To think there might be something not unpleasant about it as well as for themselves in it. — Is this posture even possible? Jacob asked, to invite Milo to hold him again under the license of imitating the statue.

— I think, that yes, Milo said. With assumed seriousness he set his feet in the crouching man’s position, one foot behind to anchor himself, the second in front and between Jacob’s legs. — And then, he continued deliberately, — I give a hand here, and a second hand here, and—

He tumbled Jacob over.

“Asshole!” Jacob said happily, lying on his back in the grass.

— So trusting, these Americans.

The gardens were so extensive and so cleverly planted with boscage along the periphery that from the vantage of the ground Jacob could look up toward the castle hill and imagine that no walls separated him from its summit. A cascade of terraces and allées carried the eye all the way up. In fact the terraces belonged to other gardens — the gardens of consuls and embassies, for the most part, Milo said, when Jacob pointed to them and asked. But the illusion was almost perfect.

— But you see? Milo asked, after they returned to their feet and as they approached the central fountain. — There’s no Puritanism in Bohemia.

From a young bronze matron’s left breast spurted a steady stream of water. A winged boy, whose hand she held as if they were dancing, turned up his lips to catch some. He wasn’t able to, but he peed uninhibitedly nonetheless from his little boy’s cock, while a dolphin, which he was standing on, spat a third, lesser arc.

— The source of sources, Jacob said.

— The sources of sources, Milo corrected. — Be liberal.

* * *

From impromptu suggestions Milo progressed to outright plans. He came up with the idea of taking Jacob to Amerika, an old quarry a few kilometers southwest of Prague that had become a swimming hole, and on a Saturday morning he picked Jacob up in his father’s army green Trabant, two folded towels and two bottles of Mattoni seltzer in the back seat, his Konica around his neck. They followed a highway south along the left bank of the Vltava until the highway veered west from the river and zigzagged. The city then folded itself up and away from them, and they found themselves driving through fields of yellow flowers. Sun fell generously across their laps. They rolled their windows down, and with his fingers Jacob made shapes that cut different sounds out of the warm air that they were speeding through.