Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

The heavy stones of the tower and the stillness of the air kept the chamber cool. They were too high up for more than a faint echo of the street’s noise to reach them. The exhibit was scheduled to close in a week, and except for the ticket seller, they had it to themselves.

Milo, as a contributor, had attended the a month and a half before and he let Jacob lead the way. The images were arranged chronologically, beginning with the march on a Friday evening in mid-November that had begun the revolution. To honor a medical student mortally wounded during an anti-Nazi demonstration half a century earlier, the government had permitted marchers to climb to Nátodní that evening from the valley below it. After laying flowers at the national cemetery, the marchers had been emboldened by their own speeches and shouts — and no doubt by the recent sight of East Germans fleeing to the West through Prague’s West German embassy — to continue north along the river. They had turned right at Nátodní and had approached Wenceslas Square. Photographs showed Národní full of people with hectic faces — waving sparklers, shielding candles from wind, and carrying hand-lettered banners calling for freedom, democracy, and the end of the Communist Party’s political monopoly. At the end of Nátodní, the protesters had been met by a row of riot police. The police had been wearing white helmets and had been carrying clear Plexiglas shields the shape of coffin lids. A young woman had held out a carnation to an even younger policeman, her blond hair as disorganized as the carnation’s frilly petals, his features as elegant, formal, and empty as the ribbed Plexiglas balanced on his arm. In front of the police barricade some of the protesters had set up a sort of garden of candles on the cobblestone; one of Milo’s snapshots had caught two young men holding four candles up to the lit cigarette of a third man, who was inhaling to kindle sparks. Soon after the shot was taken, the police had encircled a number of the protesters and forced them to exit single file through a narrow arcade, set off from the rest of the street by columns. As the protesters had passed through the arcade, a number of them had been singled out by the police for beatings.

— Were you hurt? Jacob asked.

— I wasn’t encircled, Milo answered. — I’m a homo. I was furt watching the police, what directions they were stepping in.

— Were you afraid?

— We were so aroused. There were thousands of us.

— Were you angry?

He paused. — You’re such a serious boy. He stared at one of the photos and held his breath, trying to recall what it had been like. For a moment Jacob had the impression that Milo might have stood in the street that night, at the foot of Wenceslas Square, in the pose that he was standing in now, his shoulders squared, his head a little hunched down. — Well, it was peculiar. It was rather that it was our turn.

— What do you call this? Jacob asked, pointing to a banner in a photo.

“Transparent,” said Milo.

— Did you carry a transparent ?

— I was carrying a camera.

The next few photos depicted a congeries of candles, flowers, ribbons, saints’ images, and fragments of clothing — not unlike a roadside shrine in America for the victim of an automobile accident.

— This was in the arcade on Saturday night, the next night, Milo explained. — We thought, that someone had been killed.

— Who?

— Some student of mathematics. But he was in the countryside. It was a rumor.

Jacob remembered Rafe saying that a story had been planted in the heads of the college newspaper editors.

— They say some girl on drugs thought it up, Milo continued. — She had, they say, instructions. But we all thought there had been a death.

— So there was no Palach this time, said Jacob.

— Palach? No, that was the Prague Spring.

— I mean, no one had to die this time, in order for there to be a revolution. There didn’t have to be a sacrifice.

— Well, that could be. I no longer remember what this one’s name was, the one who wasn’t dead.

Carl would appreciate the postmodern touch of a fiction in the middle of the history. Jacob would have to write to him about it. To bring themselves to the point of revolt, the Czechs and Slovaks had needed to feel sorrow and indignation, and their desire had summoned into the world a story that could focus those feelings. Of course the story would have had to come through a person whose attachment to reality was troubled — someone like an addict, whose need was more than she could stand and would tell any story to hold attention. It was better, in the end, that it had come about through a lie than through a death. Jacob wondered if the lie had been helped along, maybe by somebody Rafe knew. It would probably have been pretty easy for an American to fool the Czechs, because Americans were so trusted by them. For now they were, anyway. And for a little while longer. The question was whether one could ever use a story while seeing through it — whether one could know the truth in the moment and still do what one needed to do in order to free oneself.

Milo sidled up to one of the narrow windows and peered down at the square below, keeping himself on the near side of the stark prism of light that fell through the window, so that the light silhouetted him. He seemed to have been made bashful by something, but Jacob didn’t know whether it was by his role as the taker of some of the exhibit’s photographs or by his memory of participation in the events, which even now made grand claims for themselves. There was something solemn about the numbers of people in the photographs that followed, still impressive no matter how many times Jacob had seen photographs like them before: hundreds of thousands had gathered in Wenceslas Square in the days following the police brutality, and then even more, a few days later, in the fields behind the empty pedestal of Stalin’s monument, standing for hours in the cold listening to speeches by people offering to be their new leaders, offering to take them into a new world. Looking at the seas of faces, Jacob wondered if it was the emotions of so many people that caused the political changes or the other way around. Were the quantities of feeling released necessary to change, or were they a side effect of it? The people looked content to be where they were, yet “aroused,” as Milo put it. Jacob’s old, confused longing to take part in the lost moment in the pictures came over him again — the longing to belong to the moment, to have been alive in it. The odd thing was that he had hated to be part of any group in America. Maybe he had never been in a group large enough — a group so large that he could approach vanishing in it, which was a kind of freedom — or maybe he had never been in a group devoted to freedom itself.

— Father wanted last night, for me to tell you, that we can sleep at our house sometimes if we want. It isn’t necessary always to sleep at yours.

Jacob realized that he was looking at one of Milo’s photos: it showed a middle-aged man in a trilby and a tweed overcoat who had climbed a tree in Wenceslas Square for a better view. The man’s hands were folded, a tricolor swatch was pinned neatly to his lapel, and he was watching and listening with a placid expression. Visible through the bare branches of his tree was a poster, affixed to a lamppost, celebrating the eighteenth congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In the center of the poster there was a bold outline of the Party’s characteristic star. — What does that mean, your father’s message? Jacob asked.