Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Moment,” the girl finally replied. She darted off to find her mother.

Jacob stopped clapping while he tried to figure out how to react. Prokop meanwhile took the clapping up, as if to signal that he was willing to play Jacob’s game, whatever it was, whether his sister played or not.

“Wait a minute.” Jacob held up a hand, and the boy stopped. To compensate himself for his disappointment, the boy began kicking a leg of Jacob’s chair.

Through the kitchen door, Jacob saw Milena bend down to accept a whispered confidence from her daughter. After a conference in lowered voices, the woman and the girl walked slowly back into the central room together, with a certain ceremoniousness, Anežka leaning shyly against her mother’s side, one of Milena’s arms sheltering her daughter’s head and shoulders like a bird’s wing.

“Please, I am sorry. Anežka make pudink . Do you know, pudink ?”

“Pudding.”

“For you,” Milena continued. “Please, will you eat? She has fear, that you will not want.” Milena paused, at the edge of her capacity in English, and watched Jacob searchingly. — It isn’t necessary to eat the Jewish soup, she continued, in Czech. — But if you have a taste for pudding, it is your last day, and Anežka hoped…

“Of course,” replied Jacob. “I’ll eat the pudding right after I eat the Jewish soup.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

Anežka’s face relaxed into smiles as Milena translated his words. It was awful that he had nearly hurt the girl’s feelings because of an arbitrary wish to be more impersonal as a teacher. She was a child; children can’t help but care about the people they’re with. For that matter maybe it had been a little cruel of him to wish to be more impersonal with Milena.

“Five minute, soup, I bring,” Milena said. “Please, teach,” she added, by gesture throwing her children once more onto Jacob’s hands.

It took an effort of will to clap loudly again, because Jacob now felt abashed by how cruel he had been, and a quantum of something like cruelty is needed when making a loud noise. But Anežka was merry with restored confidence and Prokop was pleased by the resumption of the game, and soon Jacob was able to fall in with their high spirits. He taught them how to command each other to clap and to stop clapping, to wave and to stop waving, to smile and to stop smiling. The soup, when Milena brought it, proved to be a sort of tisane, clear and bittersweet. Its heat soothed him. Anežka monitored him closely as he drank, and as soon as he took his last sip — at the moment he clinked his cup down into his saucer — she hopped up and ran to her mother, calling, as she ran, for the distribution of her pudding.

Milena brought three small blue bowls out on a steel tray. It was a sweet, chilled custard, the color of good butter.

— You aren’t giving yourself any? Jacob asked.

— With husband, later, Milena explained, though she sat down at the table to share their enjoyment.

— It’s very good, Jacob complimented Anežka after his first spoonful.

— But what’s good is at the bottom, she protested. — You have to mine for the good part.

There was a compote under the custard.

— Gooseberry and cherry, Milena informed Jacob.

— Did you cook it yourself? Jacob asked Anežka.

— With Maminka.

— It’s sublime, Jacob said. — Thank you.

— Sublime, Anežka repeated to her mother.

— He thanked you, Anežka, Milena prompted.

— You’re welcome, she told Jacob, in a singsong voice.

After Milena cleared the dishes away, Jacob took from his backpack a photo of a lion, which he had cut out of a magazine advertisement. Introducing the animal as Simon, Jacob explained that the children were only to obey the commands that Simon said, not those that Jacob issued on his own authority. After a few repetitions of this rule, a few samples of commands said by Simon and commands not said by him, and at last a gloss in Czech, the children understood, and they played Simon Says with him for the next half hour, taking turns according to the rule that whoever failed to know when to obey became the next issuer of commands. From time to time Jacob introduced new vocabulary by acting out its meaning; from time to time the children asked him for vocabulary that they themselves wanted to introduce. At last, in their familiar pattern, the children began to grow a little wild, rebelling against the burden placed on their attention, and their mother, drawn by their outbursts, which she felt a responsibility to suppress, became too much the focus of the children’s attention for the game to continue, and Jacob had to surrender the lesson.

“Please, if I may,” Milena said. “I have for you a gift.” She was holding it behind her back.

Jacob, stowing his props away in his backpack, stopped himself from saying that he didn’t need one.

“It is for memory,” she continued.

As she opened her fist, he knew he would leave the gift behind, unpacked, in his apartment. It was a figurine of Christ, made of ivory-colored plastic, like a chess piece. It wasn’t a crucifix; the god was merely raising his hands above his head in benediction, a pose that prompted in Jacob a pagan analogy to the extended arms of a flying superhero. An American child would be tempted to zoom the figurine around the room. Prokop and Anežka, though, were observing quietly, respectful of the solemnity with which their mother had invested the object. Jacob wished that Carl was still living with him and that he could share a demystifying laugh with him about it when he got home. It was going to look uncanny in the Žižkovižkov apartment. Maybe he would put it in a drawer right away rather than wait to forget it.

“Thank you,” Jacob said. He was on his guard. It would only be reasonable for Milena to want to know whether he had enough faith to appreciate the gift.

“It is of church,” she said. She laughed at the clumsiness of her English; she knew that it went without saying that such a figure belonged to the realm of churches. “It is of church we go,” she tried again to explain, gesturing to her children and herself. She didn’t indicate whether her husband went, too. Out of her there then spilled an account in Czech of her church, its location, its architecture, the saint it was named for, the priest who ministered there, and the parishioners who had returned to worship since the revolution. Jacob wasn’t able to follow everything she said and retreated into nodding. He couldn’t tell if the church was something new in her life or something that she was newly free to speak of. He had the sense that it stood for, or stood in the way of, a need that threatened to be overwhelming. In sympathy, maybe in hope of solidarity, he glanced at Prokop and Anežka, but there was no sign in them of resistance, unless they had taken refuge in a mild blankness.

From this blankness their mother released them by declaring that the family was going to go for a walk. Prokop groaned, then ran to get his soccer ball so that the time spent on the walk wouldn’t be a total loss. He began kicking it despite his mother’s insistence that he wait until they were outdoors. Anežka took up her doll . Then, changing her mind, she asked if she could carry one of the rabbits from downstairs. Halfheartedly and unsuccessfully Milena argued that Prokop should leave his soccer ball behind and walk quietly and dutifully. To Anežka she pointed out that the rabbit would be frightened by the soccer ball if by nothing worse and might run off.

— But he’s a good boy, Anežka said, in the rabbit’s defense.

“Please,” Milena asked, returning to English, “have you time? We take walk. You with us? For last time.”