Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“You mean, what do you say because he’s gay?” Jacob considered. “That’s a tricky one.”

“Isn’t it? Because if you say you’re gay, and he makes a pass at you, what then? Even if you really are gay, you might not want to go to bed with him.”

“You could say you’re a tolerant person.”

“And that would be highly laudable in you, but a bit abstract, don’t you think? Everyone likes to say they’re tolerant.”

“I give up.”

“My friend didn’t get it, either,” said Rafe. His hot water had come and the old leaves were steeping; he fussed with the pot to give Jacob time for one more chance. “Come on.”

“No idea.”

“You say you have a gay brother,” Rafe revealed, pouring himself a new cup.

“Oh, that’s good,” Jacob admitted. “Because then he thinks you’re an ally, but there’s no possibility of romantic trouble.”

“Isn’t it good?”

“Too bad I couldn’t figure it out.”

“I imagine you’re usually pretty good at puzzles, though. At thinking about people. There’s almost always a story that people are telling about themselves, and sometimes you can get them to tell it ever so slightly differently.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Don’t be bashful. I’m just saying, what if you’re bored? At this school. What if you’re of my party without knowing it?”

“Which party is that?”

Rafe grinned for an answer.

“Goethe’s or Schiller’s?” Jacob asked. “You could have told me that you had a gay brother,” Jacob ventured.

“But I don’t need to win your trust. After all we’ve been through. Or do I, still? Is that what you’re saying? That’s not very nice, if so. But then I might answer that it wouldn’t be a matter of urgency for me because you don’t really know anything. Not anything strategic.”

“I really don’t,” Jacob said carefully.

“See?” Rafe met his gaze. “You say that with such conviction. That’s why I say you could be dangerous.”

“Dangerous to whom?”

“You tell me,” Rafe challenged him. “To the Schillers of the world?”

“Wasn’t it Schiller who explained the difference between and conscious art?”

“To the Goethes, then. Who can be even trickier. See, I think you’re more like me, and that you’d find that even what my friend went out for was too tiresome for you. You wouldn’t like the having-an-allegiance part of it.”

“Did your friend get in?”

“He said he didn’t, but I imagine they tell them to say that, too.”

“So you don’t have an allegiance yourself.”

“Do I seem to? I don’t think I’m the sort who really has a home team.”

“Kaspar said something like that about you.”

Rafe sipped his tea. “I think Kaspar and I understand each other, finally.”

* * *

Leaving requires work. There were a few more books that he meant to buy. He had to sort his clothes into those worth bringing home and those that it made more sense to leave behind. He decided that his fireproof red blanket should stay but that his Russian-made windup alarm clock could come home with him. He left Václav’s empty cage on the sidewalk one morning, and it was gone by the time he returned from teaching in the afternoon. Chores distracted him from such maudlin trains of thought as wondering whether he was likely to recognize in the moment the last time that he and Milo went to bed together.

In Paris, it would be convenient to have a student ID card, and he raised the subject with Henry, who worked after all at the Czechoslovak government’s office for foreign students. Henry invited him to drop by his office some morning. He could issue Jacob a card, and they could have lunch afterward.

Annie helped Jacob buy a scarf for Jacob’s mother one afternoon, and they ended up at the foot of Wenceslas Square, listening to the four Czech teenagers who sang early Beatles songs under the English-language name the Dogs. The Dogs were surrounded by a ring of young trampové , native and foreign. Cheery and dated, the songs corresponded to a popular idea of the revolution as an outburst that had been meant to happen at the end of the 1960s and had somehow been preserved from staling or souring.

“They’re not bad,” said Annie. They were standing at a slight remove from the Dogs’ admirers.

“It’s funny that people come halfway around the world to hear songs they already know.”

“Everything needn’t always be improving.”

“I didn’t say it was wrong to like it.”

“But you think it’s simple.” The song ended; there was a clatter of applause. “It’s a pity you can’t stay longer,” she added, before the young people began to sing again.

“I can’t.”

“I didn’t say I thought you could. There are things you mean to do.”

He was silenced by her flattery, if it was flattery. He believed in his ability to turn away from things. It had served him in the past, and it had become associated in his mind with the indifference to outcome that he had decided was the best way to approach a love affair. He even felt a little sorry for Annie on account of the strength of her attachments — her inability to turn away — though he knew it was ugly of him.

To shift the topic of conversation, he told her that Henry was going to make him an ID. She wondered why none of them had thought to ask for one before, and it occurred to her that she ought to ask for one as well.

That night, at the , she persuaded Thom to come along and ask for one, too.

By this chain of events, rather than through any sentimental planning, Jacob found himself having lunch in Josefov with his closest friends a few days before leaving. The meal began awkwardly, because Henry had balked when they had showed up in the lobby of his building. In a formal voice, he had asked them for documentation, and Annie had been taken aback. “But you know I haven’t got any,” she had objected. Thom had begged off, assuring Henry that he hadn’t meant to put him to any trouble. Jacob, however, had brazened it out. He had brought with him a letter from the school that he was going to attend, which constituted if not proof — he was not a student there yet — then a sufficient cover. In the lobby, after Henry had vanished back upstairs to type up Jacob’s card, Annie stewed. “I suppose after all I’m not going to poxy Paris.” It took a quarter of an hour for Henry to make the laminated card.

They walked down the block to a restaurant where Henry and Carl used to eat, recognizable to Jacob from a photo that Carl had taken there. A large window opened the dining room to the street. From a stone wall, an oversize oil portrait of one of Czechoslovakia’s last Communist leaders, a bland and corpulent face, ironically presided. When they chose a table — they took the corner of a communal one — Annie was still letting Henry have it.

“I had no notion of you as such an upholder of the laws,” she said.

“They pay me to be.”

“It’s quite responsible of you.”

“He does work for the government,” Thom said. “He has to keep a clean backside.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” A few wisps of her peach-red hair fell across her face as she looked down to study the menu, but rather than smooth them away she merely looked steadily through them. Henry was sitting beside her, and it was easy for the two of them, facing the same direction, not to meet each other’s gaze.

“He has to be something of a politician, I suspect,” Thom continued. When Annie didn’t reply or look up, he added, “But come the revolution, eh, Annie?”