Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— Will you sell to the films?

— For millions.

— Maybe you will write me letters, between your novels.

— Maybe, but I will be very famous.

— But right now you’re mine, Milo asserted.

— Yes, Jacob quietly admitted. — You see?

— An opportunity of the moment.

He was deceiving Milo for the sake of the look in his eyes.

* * *

Everyday life continues during a love affair, though it loses any power to be menacing. One sees it as if from the other side of the room. It can’t issue verdicts or decide meanings and becomes for the interim no more than something to appreciate or humor, as the case may be, unless the lovers on a whim choose to bring a moment of it inside the boundary, invisible to others, that has been drawn around them.

Jacob paid no less attention to his teaching but he no longer worried about it. At the language school, whenever his students couldn’t guess a word’s meaning, he liked to draw a picture on the chalkboard. His drawings used to be clumsy, but suddenly he seemed to have a knack for them, which he recognized, when he studied himself a little, as no more than a new, happy indifference to whether the drawings came out so badly that his students laughed at them — as sometimes they still did.

A lover’s detachment fell in conveniently with a complication of mood that had come over the city. Before Jacob’s arrival, the story of the revolution had held everyone tightly, he imagined, but the season of late spring that they were now passing through was not the first to follow the revolution but the second. The revolution was receding into the past; its grip as a story was weakening. There was a general sense of unraveling, of drift, of inconsequentiality. In their thoughts people were beginning to go their separate ways. It wouldn’t have been tactful to make too much of it; there was no point in throwing the fact of differentiation in anyone’s face. It went largely undiscussed.

It was perceptible, though, in new patterns of life. Catercorner to the new bakery where Jacob had begun to buy cornflakes, one day a new butcher’s shop appeared, where it was possible to buy fresh pork chops and beef steaks, as well as better grades of sausage than the government-run shops kept in supply. When the bakery had opened, a crowd had rushed in to try it. But no crowd gathered at the new butcher’s. There were now so many new shops that no single one was any longer a matter of general public interest. The butcher’s prices were fairly high, and it was beginning to occur to people that not everyone would be able to afford every new shop that opened. Some shops were going to be for some people; others, for others. Some shops would be reserved implicitly for special occasions, which would come at different times to different people. One’s pride was at stake, and as a measure of prudence, one had to begin to think a little more narrowly, keeping in mind one’s personal wishes and means rather than those of the average worker — the ideal customer that the old shops, in their uniformity, had been addressed to.

It contributed to Jacob’s awareness of the dispersal that the end of the school year was soon going to break up his classes at the language school. He was going to miss the regularity and sense of purpose they provided, as well as the students themselves. For a month now, the editors of the Charles University student newspaper, the ones who Rafe had introduced him to, had been putting off their sessions from week to week pleading the need to prepare for exams, and at this point Jacob no longer expected to meet with them again. Though the academic calendar didn’t affect his other private students, the new restlessness did. One day after class at the chemistry institute, the well-dressed Pavel rose and with a certain deliberateness shook Jacob’s hand.

“I must thank you,” he said. “I have a new post, and I believe that English was of assistance.”

“You spoke beautiful English long before I arrived,” Jacob replied.

“I am not so sure.”

“Congratulations, though. What’s the job?”

“I will be a senior research designer in composite materials. It is with an Austrian firm, in Linz.”

“Don’t they speak German?”

“I happen to speak German also, but I believe, that they appreciate my English.”

In order to listen in, the pretty Zuzana had delayed getting up from her chair. Now she observed, “He is brilliant in languages and in chemistry, Pavel.”

“He is too young to know German,” complained the elderly Bohumil, who had also been eavesdropping. “He is too clever for his age.”

“And you, for your age,” Pavel retorted. “Bohumil also speaks German, very well.”

“Everyone of my generation speaks it,” Bohumil said, swatting away the compliment. “One had the impression here, for a while, that it was going to be the Weltsprache. ”

Jacob wished Pavel luck. Ivan lingered; he also had news. Over the weekend he had met with a young businessman who had a new idea. He proposed to teach through television; after all, there was one in almost every home already, even in Czechoslovakia. The man would very much like to meet Jacob. He was perhaps Jacob’s age. Could Ivan bring Jacob to his office?

“Are you going to work for him?” Jacob asked.

“I suspect, that I am not. But it is an opportunity for you, I think.”

As Jacob walked to his bus stop, Ivan described the man’s office on the northern periphery of the city, in a concrete building that the authorities had erected as a temporary structure not long after World War II but had never got around to demolishing and replacing. It didn’t have many windows. A tram depot was across the street. Through the fence one could see some trams of an older design, which no longer ran, but which Ivan remembered from childhood.

“I’m going back to America pretty soon, I think,” Jacob said.

“But it is an opportunity,” Ivan persisted. He drew his right hand up and out, an expansive gesture not at all in keeping with his usual birdlike manner. He must have picked it up from the young businessman.

“I don’t think I should,” Jacob said. He felt that he was being ungrateful and slightly cruel.

That night he met his expatriate friends at the Country Club. At the back of the building’s lobby, at the top of the stairs that led into the basement hall, it was possible to look over the banister and survey the rows of folding tables below. At first Jacob didn’t see anyone he knew. He had arrived a little early; perhaps he was the first one. The dance floor was empty; the dedicated dancers, distinguishable by green knickers on the men and red aprons on the women, were drinking in a loose group at the bar in the far corner. A hum of talk was diffused by the hall’s echoes and rose generally, like the cigarette smoke, which, as it was stirred by the hall’s hot lights, dissolved into a glare that filled the volume of the room. Down into this brightness Jacob squinted until at last he spotted Annie at a distant table. Elinor was sitting daintily across from her, and Vincent next to Annie, his large hands folded on the table in front of him. Jacob took the stairs quickly.

“Do you know if any of the fellows are coming?” Vincent asked at once.

“The fellows?” Jacob echoed.

“Vincent doesn’t care to be sentenced to a night of conversation with women,” said Annie.

“Not a night of conversation , no,” replied Vincent.

“You see?” said Annie. “Elinor and I were just having a chat about Czech ice cream. I’m partial to the apricot myself.”

“Have you been to the place in ?” Jacob asked. It was the one Milo had taken him to, on the day that Milo had picked him up in the bookstore.