Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Oh, if it’s for the revolution that you want it…,” Henry suggested.

“Now he sings a different tune,” said Thom.

“For the revolution but not for his friends,” Annie observed.

“He did make a card for Jacob.”

“His papers are all nicely in order, aren’t they,” she replied.

No one had an answer.

“If it’s very important to you…,” Henry began, after a pause.

“Oh no, I don’t much care, really. I’m merely noticing. I had you figured as more of a free spirit, as it were. That’s all. But perhaps I’m the only free spirit left — the only one who isn’t fecking off to do something sensible with his life. Among the lot of you, at any rate.”

“Henry and I are staying, aren’t we,” said Thom. “For a while more, anyway.”

A waiter came and took their orders.

The rhythm of what happened in restaurants now passed without any special observation by Jacob. The strangeness had gone out of this world; he had got used to it here. If it was strangeness that he was after, he was going to have to look elsewhere, the way Rafe was going to.

“Have you got any fags?” Annie asked Thom, once the waiter had left.

“I haven’t. It’s against the rules now.”

“What’s this?” Henry asked.

“Every morning I put the crowns that I would otherwise spend on them into a bowl in the kitchen. As a fund for the young Tomáš that is to be — for his nappies and such. I’ve saved quite a sum. Sparty don’t come free, you know.”

“They’re quite dear,” Annie agreed.

They complimented Thom on his willpower.

“It will all be more difficult now, won’t it,” Annie generalized. “Everything will take more strength.”

“Will it be as bad as all that?” Thom asked.

She nodded a few times, as if encouraging herself. “It’s better to face up to it.”

“It will be a shame to say good-bye, won’t it,” Thom admitted.

As the next to leave, Jacob didn’t know what to say. Henry, too, was silent. Jacob had claimed in the writing group that stories that resisted being stories weren’t to his taste, but his own search had brought him to a position not unlike Henry’s, or what he imagined Henry’s to be. He was playing the rogue consciously now. It was a different place in the story than he was used to looking from. He wasn’t sure he could see everything — everything, at any rate, that he was used to being able to see. He wasn’t sure he knew where to look in order to see it.

Their food came. “If we’re free spirits,” he risked, “we have to be free to leave, don’t we?”

“Och, your theory again,” Annie said. “Must you leave in order to prove it?”

According to his policy of insouciance, he didn’t let himself think about losses, except for a vague awareness of a sort of clearing that his departure was going to make in his life.

“Are we to meet your friend ever?” she wondered.

“I don’t know.”

Thom broke in: “As it happens I’m under instructions from Jana to invite him and the lot of you to that immodest swimming hole this weekend. The one she was on about the other night.”

“I thought you weren’t to be allowed to go,” said Henry.

“She’s consented to take me after all, though she prefers to remain decent herself, given her condition, on the understanding that her restraint isn’t to hinder the rest of us.”

“I’m game,” said Henry.

“I wasn’t expecting anything so bold of you,” Annie told Thom.

“Did you think me a shrinking violet?”

“It isn’t that, exactly.”

“There aren’t many in Prague with ginger hair like Thom’s,” said Henry. “It might be said that he has a sort of duty.”

“I suppose it does come with a certain responsibility.”

“What does?” asked Annie.

“The magnificence of my person.”

“Gah.”

“There are the Czech women who use henna,” Jacob suggested.

“Do you think they use it down there as well?” Thom asked. “That would be a sight.”

“And you’ll bring your man, if we go?” Annie asked Jacob.

“I think he’d be up for it.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“Are you suggesting that the sight of myself alone would not be a sufficient draw?” Thom asked.

“You can be such a git.”

* * *

Jacob’s last lesson was with Milena’s children. On the bus, he noticed a tickle in the back of his throat. Was he getting sick again? He didn’t have time to. He sat still and closed his eyes to preserve his energy. The long, boxy bus seemed to try to curve with the hills as it mounted them. The engine whined with strain on the upward slopes, and he felt himself sway with inertia against the vehicle’s turnings.

He found the lindens on the family’s street heavy with dark, wavering leaves, offering themselves to the late-afternoon sun like so many opened hands. On the vine that climbed the wall in front of the family’s house, the leaves were also broad and plentiful. Looking up into them, as a breeze riffled them and as he waited for an answer to his ring, he saw hidden there, as if he were looking up the leg of a man’s shorts, a constellation: unripe pearls of fruit, small, pale, and tight. When the breeze dropped, the leaves covering the fruit also subsided, but having seen one cluster, he was now able to see others peeping from under drapery elsewhere in the vine.

In greeting Jacob, Prokop and Anežka were noisy with pleasure. When Jacob asked their mother for a pain reliever, he explained that his throat hurt. He didn’t want her to think that he minded the children’s loud cries.

— May I? she asked, and pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. — The color isn’t good, she said of his complexion. She shifted her gaze to the side and to the floor, nervous about having taken the liberties of touching him and looking at him closely.

— A Paralen will be enough for me, he said.

She hurried to fetch the medicine. He didn’t like it that her worry about him was so marked. Even now, in their last session, he was still hoping to give a more professional cast to the relationship between them — to hold himself at a certain distance from her. Prokop and Anežka, hushed by the mention of illness, observed Jacob without any apparent expectation that he would speak to them before he had been ministered to. No other children from the neighborhood seemed to have come. Maybe their parents hadn’t seen the point of paying for education that would have no sequel.

— I’ll cook something for you, Milena said, when she returned with a box of pills and a glass of water. — I’ll cook you a Jewish soup. Do you know it? Wait, wait, she said, as she moved toward the kitchen.

— I don’t need, he called after her.

— Garlic, lemon, and honey. It will cure you.

— We’re starting the lesson, Jacob said.

— Wait, wait, she told him again. When she saw that he wouldn’t, she put her head down, continued into the kitchen, and struck a match to light a burner, as if to prove that she could be as stubborn as he could.

At his usual seat at the dining room table, Jacob began to clap his hands. Prokop studied this not-quite-adult behavior with embarrassment and admiration, but Anežka squirmed out of her chair, unconsciously covering her ears to shut out the sharp sound that he was making.

“Anežka, where are you going?” he asked in English.

She hesitated. She looked toward the kitchen.

“I can clap more softly,” he offered, as he did so. “Why don’t you sit down,” he suggested, nodding at her seat, as he continued to clap. Here he was, prematurely using a command that he had been hoping to teach, he reproached himself. He knew Anežka couldn’t understand his words, but he thought she could follow his body language and he didn’t want to capitulate and speak Czech so early in the lesson.