Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They browsed independently. Annie found a novel that her mother had recommended, by Elizabeth Bowen, and Jacob picked out a little blue Oxford World’s Classic of a Renaissance travel narrative, by an Englishman who claimed to have visited the land of Prester John on his way back from China.

“Because we’re at the edge of the world?” Annie asked in a whisper, as they compared their choices at a table in the back of the room.

“I guess.” In fact the library’s schoolroom look had made him feel guilty, and he had chosen the book in a spirit of self-improvement. Over the next two weeks, even though he would find little in it that interested him, beyond a few outlandishly fictional cannibals, he would dutifully read all the way to the end. He wasn’t, after all, writing anything.

“Have you fallen for this Luboš, then?” she asked, fussing with a corner of her book’s cellophane wrapper, which had come untucked.

“We just met.”

“You fancy him, in any case.” She didn’t raise her eyes to his. “I hope you’ll keep your wits about you.”

“I’m not a romantic. I’m gay, remember.”

“You are a romantic,” she answered, and then added, quickly, “I am, too; it’s all right.”

“I don’t think that the other thing is here yet. I think that’s why he thought he could joke about it.”

“But that doesn’t mean he’s on the level.” She looked up and saw that she’d hurt his feelings for Luboš. “I haven’t even met him. Don’t listen to me.”

“There’s something very sweet about him.”

“Oh, well, ‘sweet.’ Perhaps you aren’t very far gone, then.” The fluorescent lights and the Formica tabletop between them seemed to put them in a context incongruously childish. “You should tell Melinda, you know,” she said abruptly. “It’s absurd of you not to. There’s nothing she likes better than a secret she’s justified in keeping from Rafe.”

“I probably will, before too long.”

“You’ll have to, if I go, or you won’t have anyone to talk to.”

“What do you mean, if you go?”

“I thought I told you. I know I did. I find it quite lonely here. And gray, you know, all the time. I’m thinking of going back to Berlin.”

“You can’t go.”

“Well, I can, Jacob. Why don’t you come with me? There’s a real scene there. You’d be shut of all this poxy Czech mysteriousness.”

It was as if she had ventilated the room with a draft of the cold air outside. Suddenly he saw how easy it would be to go elsewhere.

“You could teach English, as you do here,” Annie continued. “We aren’t undesirables.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, but he found later that he was reluctant to.

* * *

Annie didn’t leave, not immediately. On the contrary, she grew closer to the circle of expatriates that held her and Jacob, and that circle drew tighter. They all began to feel for it. At the nucleus were the Scots — Thom, Michael, and a few others — who formed the habit, after school let out, of stopping in at a nearby pub for a drink. Sometimes they also ordered the classic Czech dinner of pork cutlets, dumplings, and boiled cabbage; sometimes they didn’t bother with dinner; more than once they stayed until eleven, when the pub closed. Henry offered to join them if they were willing to meet downtown; he neither worked nor lived near the language school. Annie also urged them to move, because it made her nervous to drink so close to where she worked. As a group, they were conspicuously not Czech, even if they were no louder and no more drunk than anyone else. She hoped, too, that the clientele downtown might be a touch more genteel and put the lads on their mettle, a bit. No one else hoped this, or expected it, and it was mostly on account of their respect for Henry that the Scots did eventually move. They began to rendezvous with him three or four nights a week at the Automat, a buffet-style diner with steam tables at the foot of Wenceslas Square, which belonged to the cheapest class of eatery that the government certified, and to progress from there to a pub nearby. Annie joined them regularly at the new pub, though not at the Automat, whose food she could not bring herself to eat, and in her wake came a few other women who taught at the school, and Jacob, too, once he sensed that there would be enough women present to camouflage any lapses he might have from perfect masculinity. Rafe rarely came, but sometimes Melinda did. They had the sense that she was on loan to them, and her dresses and coats seemed to confirm the impression that she was finer than the settings they had chosen, and so, for the sake of balance and a kind of politeness, she was always particularly foul-mouthed in her banter, to show that her enjoyment was genuine — that she, at least, did not think she was slumming.

Their first downtown pub was U , where the waiters made no attempt to speak to them in anything but an abrupt, efficient Czech, and delivered beers with a promptness and mild irony that suggested that they recognized the Scots, Irish, and English to be representatives of a fellow pub-going culture. Their circle was so numerous that they usually had a table to themselves. There was sawdust on the floor, but the cutlets and gulash were excellent, as everyone agreed who wasn’t, like the Scots, economizing on meals in order to have as many crowns as possible for beer. The little bears that the pub was named for were painted on a sign hanging over its front door, and Jacob soon thought of them fondly, like characters in a fairy tale that he was having the good fortune to live out. The evenings were a holiday from his project of understanding the Czechs and of eavesdropping on the after echoes of their revolution, and some nights he seemed to forget about his project altogether for a while. Their time together was wonderfully insular; it sometimes felt to Jacob as if the world beyond their table, beyond the ring of his friends, did not exist.

He would probably have forgotten about his project for good if it weren’t for the problem of love. All the Scots were beautiful, especially Thom, with his square jaw and his blond hair flopping into his eyes, but Jacob was through with the mistake of falling for straight men. In America he had revealed his crushes to three straight men in a row, all of whom had been generous enough to let him get to know them anyway, and he had been able to see for himself the unlikelihood of reciprocity in such cases. He wasn’t alone in not knowing what to do about love. With the exception of Mel and Rafe, almost no one in the circle had a lover, not for long anyway. It sometimes felt as if, in compensation, they were all falling in love with one another, as a group.

One night, for the sake of variety, they shifted their drinking place north, to a pub that specialized in Slavic cuisine. The food was good, but the waiters, to judge by their reluctance to serve it, seemed not to trust expatriates to appreciate it. The beer arrived infrequently, and only in large amounts, forcing all the drinkers into a single rhythm, as if they were on an assembly line. Between deliveries, the waiters sat at a table of their own, in a corner, drinking and smoking; they rose from it of their own accord only to place folded cards, on which the word was printed in red, on tables abandoned by diners, to prevent any new patrons from sitting at them. Once, when Henry asked for a light, a waiter made a point of fetching an unopened box of matches from the kitchen and depositing it on the table with an aggrieved “Prosím,” instead of striking one from the box visible in the pocket of his white shirt. In revenge, Henry quietly taught Jacob a Czech word for waiter that was approximately as offensive, he said, as “bastard” or “son of a bitch” in English. “One sees, at times, why such a specialized profanity would have developed,” he added. The word could have gotten them thrown out if spoken too loudly, and it was tacit that Henry trusted Jacob not to use it — and not to disclose it to the Scots.