Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

It had to be a washing machine, Jacob decided. He looked up , the Czech word for “washing machine,” in a large, scholarly Czech-English dictionary that he had recently bought. “Twin-tub” was listed as an English equivalent. Jacob had never heard of a twin-tub, but the two cylinders seemed to confirm that he was looking at one. The next time he went to the grocery store, he bought detergent.

He couldn’t tell where it was supposed to go. More bafflingly, he couldn’t see how to get water into the twin-tub. He tried slipping the end of the rubber hose over the bathtub’s faucet, like a sleeve over an arm, but water pressure kept popping it off, and he realized that the hose had to be for draining. Oops. He filled a couple of pots and poured water into the large cylinder by hand. It took a while.

There were other quirks. The apparatus didn’t seem to have a timer, so Jacob had to decide for himself how long to soak clothes, how long to let the large cylinder agitate them, and how many times to drain and refill when rinsing. Moreover, the agitation of clothes in the large cylinder — the “washing” aspect of the washing machine — was somewhat violent. The rotor churned despite the absence of a lid, and after the rotor tore one of his paisley shirts, he risked his fingers whenever he saw a shirt matting itself up into dangerous intimacy with the chunk-chunking blades. After one of his fingers was bruised, he found a stick of lumber and thereafter supervised the washing stick in hand, like a caveman over a cauldron.

The second cylinder, which worked as a centrifuge, also proved temperamental. It could only hold two, at most three, items of clothing at a time. Whenever Jacob tried more, it either wobbled limply or, if it reached a high speed, became unbalanced and clanked with horrifically loud clanks against the outer basin. It was a chastening sound.

Jacob was proud of his ability to figure the twin-tub out. And as the novelty subsided, he noticed that this pride was supplemented by a subtler one, a sort of boastfulness about the grotesquerie: the more backward the twin-tub was, the more authentic the difference of Jacob’s experience in Czechoslovakia. Expatriate’s vanity. But in the long run pride and vanity weren’t sufficient compensation for tedium. The twin-tub began to irritate him. It was loud. It mauled his clothes. It took most of a day to use.

There was a public coin-operated Laundromat in Prague. It was run, rumor had it, by an American who had been flown to Prague by a fundamentalist Christian organization. The Christians had hired him to run an English-teaching program, the sooner to bring the Reds to God and capitalism, but he had defected once he had recognized the business opportunity that a nation without Laundromats represented. His prices were reasonable, but his business was located in the ambassador’s district, too far away from Žižkovižkov to be worth the trip.

A Saturday morning came when Jacob had only dirty clothes and acutely resented the expense of his life that would be required to clean them. However unfairly, to himself as well as to Czechoslovakia, he began to think about how little time he had given to writing in the past year. Was it completely wrongheaded, completely unjust, to wonder if it was because daily life in Prague was so effortful? Carl had referred to thinking along such lines as “convenience theory,” the joke being that it was too self-regarding and smug, too obviously lacking the impersonality and flexibility of what counted as theory with genuine philosophers. Convenience theory didn’t really amount to much more than homesickness for capitalism and the ways that capitalism made smooth, and in acknowledgment of its limits, Jacob’s resentment began to take a merely personal form — to become understandable to himself as shame. The strange task of laundering his clothes in a twin-tub was one that he had chosen as a corollary of having chosen to live in an economy that had not yet gotten over the idea that everyone should be put continually to familiar trouble so that no one should ever have to be put to any new kind of trouble. Jacob could have sold himself in America for enough money to buy his way clear of such troubles, which were after all unfamiliar to him if not to Czechs and Slovaks, but he had felt that he would be soiled by such a sale. He had felt there to be something inside him too fine for compromise, so he had fled here, where no one knew how to buy that thing in him and where he had unawares thrown himself instead in the way of an existential danger new to him, the danger of wasting his energies on surmounting inconveniences. It was possible here to spend a lifetime on nothing more. What if the year that he had spent in this world had been a mistake? It had surely had an effect on him; maybe it had lowered his expectations of himself. When he returned to America, he would probably find that the people he had known in college had gotten ahead of him. They would have made some progress in the past year in passing through the nameless task that he had found so distasteful. What had he been doing instead? Someone like Kaspar could say that he had been saving his soul, but Jacob would never be able to convince himself of the materiality of any such claim in his own case. He was an American; Americans had no souls; at any rate they never pretended to be sensible of them. It was an implicit promise of the socialism dying in Czechoslovakia that money should stain no one’s spirit, and the part of Jacob that wanted to hold itself pure had been taken in by that promise, even though what had first attracted him to the country was its story of revolution — that is, its story of having at last given the lie to the changelessness that was purity’s complement. He had come here because he had heard that a false haven was vanishing, only to discover that in dying it still appealed even to him, a stranger, with sufficient strength that he, too, felt drawn to and then betrayed by it, so bitterly betrayed that now, although he knew it was vanishing, he felt eager for it to be stamped out of existence as cruelly and as quickly as possible.

Having thought all these thoughts, he observed that his laundry was still dirty and that he still didn’t want to wash it. Milo had promised to come over, but he didn’t want to see Milo, either. He put his Olivetti on the kitchen table and unzipped it from its case. The windows in the bedroom were open, as were those in the kitchen, which faced the building’s inner courtyard, and a rather savage crosswind blew between them. The wind was hot and somewhat pleasant as it beat against his face, but it kept scattering the papers that he set beside the typewriter, and he had to weigh them down with a glass of water. It didn’t matter because he wasn’t in the middle of anything, so he didn’t really need to look at the papers; he was going to have to start something new. It occurred to him to write about the time that had taken him to the hospital in the middle of the night. He liked the idea of writing about himself in a state of collapse. A collapse suggested that there was something underneath it, a foundation of some kind to collapse into, and it added a color of significance.

He typed a couple of lines.

He didn’t know how he was going to explain to Milo why he hadn’t showered yet and why he didn’t want to spend the day with him. Milo would just have to accept it. It would be wrong for him to make too much of it. It didn’t have to do with him, or with Jacob’s feelings for him, except insofar as Jacob felt the apprehension, despite his decision to spend the day writing, that once Milo arrived, he would lose himself in Milo, as he usually did. When Milo was around, he wasn’t able to hear himself any more. He was only able to hear what he had to say to Milo. That was the problem with other people; that was the problem with just living your life. He ought to have written a second novel during the time he’d spent in Prague. If he had, he wouldn’t have had to lie when he’d wanted Milo to continue looking at him the way he’d looked at him that day on hill. What a lot of reproaches he was making of himself today. He was awfully grand, even in misery, wasn’t he. He was feeling the sort of frustration whose pettiness inclines one’s better self to wish to dismiss it, if it were possible to.