Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“To the church?”

Milena shook her head, as if embarrassed now by her earlier confession.

“I could go for a little walk,” Jacob said, even though he wanted to get home to Milo.

— There is a prospect nearby, Milena said, resorting again to Czech. — It’s possible from there to see far. Are you well enough? I wanted to show it to you. And I will gather herbs for you, so that you can make a tea for yourself. For your cold. She named the plants that she wanted to gather, but even in English the names would have been lost on Jacob. — It will cure your throat, she promised.

Jacob made an effort to look open to believing in the remedy. He was never going to see anyone in the family again, and it seemed important not to disillusion them — to leave them with the impression that he believed in as much as they did — that he might keep the figurine, that he might go home and brew the tea.

Outside, after they had put on their shoes at the foot of the stairs, the group paused while Anežka unhooked the door of the hutch, took one of the rabbits into her arms, petted him, introduced him to Jacob, and regretted that the walk would be too scary for him. Prokop juggled his soccer ball on a foot. When the ball went astray into the garden, where orange squash blossoms were beginning to shrink inward, sensing the removal of the sun’s attention for the day, perhaps beginning the plant’s greater withdrawal into maturity, Jacob said, “Whoops,” and retrieved the ball for him.

Prokop giddily took up the new word as a refrain. Milena shook her head at the ebullience and glanced at Jacob to see if it was trying his patience. She scolded Prokop when he followed his ball into the street, though there were no cars, and Anežka, now rabbitless, joined in scolding him. The group followed the chaotic energy that seemed to be focused in the soccer ball, as if they were being pulled forward by something that kept slipping out of harness. Jacob was aware that he was still fighting off illness; he had the sense that there was a certain inefficacy to his idea of the world — that his idea wasn’t apprehending the world as firmly as it was necessary to apprehend it — that he and the world weren’t altogether real to each other.

At the end of the first block the group turned left; at the end of the next block, right. They left the neighborhood where the family lived, full of older villas, for a sort of real estate developer’s fallow, a scrub wilderness of oddly shaped vacant lots on the periphery of a newish complex of paneláky . Children had beaten a dirt path through the fallow. Milena paused to twist a few purple twigs off of a spindly willow; in a clearing that was still sunny, she picked what looked like tiny daisies. She carried her little harvest in a pouch that she improvised by holding up the skirt of her apron.

The ground grew so uneven that Prokop gave up on his soccer drills. A white boulder ended their path with an appearance of having fallen across it. Prokop was the first to scramble up. Upon joining him, Jacob saw that they stood at the top of a tall escarpment. An eroding slurry of blond rock led downward; far below, the black Vltava wound in a gentle S. Milena warned her children to keep away from the edge, but it was not so steep as to be dangerous.

By suppressing the growth of the scrub trees, boulder and slurry had cut a sightline to the west. The vista to be had through the gap was a pastoral. On the far side of the river, in a bend of it, a green field was being mown. Horses were drawing steel rigs, under the guidance of men with dinted torsos, so distant and so far below that only the facts of horses, steel, and men were discernible. The scene was gilded by the sun, which was low but still full of power. Because no more than the presence of the men could be seen, Jacob let himself stare at them freely, his motive for staring all but invisible. Beyond the field, stretching toward the horizon, waited a forest, over which a blue haze seemed to be settling.

“What’s over there?” Jacob asked.

Milena shrugged. — It’s called Šárka.

“It’s a park, isn’t it,” Jacob said.

— Yes, it’s a valley, she answered.

He thanked her for having brought him to see it.

“Please I must to say something you,” she said in her halting English. “You have free…”

“Freedom?”

“Yes. Is very dear.” She seemed worried by the boldness of her words, and she looked at him as shyly as her daughter sometimes did, despite the whiteness of her hair and despite the matronly bun that she wore it in.

“You’re free here now, too,” Jacob said. “Here in Czechoslovakia.” It felt safer to him to turn away her compliment; he wasn’t sure he understood it.

“Maybe I said not right. You have free”—she paused, having remembered that Jacob had corrected her use of the word, but already having forgotten how he had corrected it; she soldiered on—“free”—she reached out and without touching pointed quickly, in a birdlike motion, at the left side of his chest, wincing as she did so at the temerity and possible rudeness of the gesture—“here. It is not America, in you. Ne jenom. ”

“Not only,” Jacob translated for her.

She bit a curled index finger as she tried to conjure up more of the words that she needed. Meanwhile, at the front of the boulder, Prokop was throwing pebbles into the vista, and Anežka was helping him by gathering ammunition. It occurred to Jacob that he wasn’t going to get to see the children grow up, but there were a lot of children he wouldn’t see grow up. “You have sensitive…,” she tried again.

“How does being sensitive make me free?” Jacob asked. He had become fairly certain that the opposite was the case.

Milena laughed and shrugged, embarrassed either because she couldn’t answer or because she hadn’t understood his question. “You know things,” she tried again. “Of people.”

Jacob nodded noncommittally.

With some agitation she pointed at his breast again. “You have sensitive sool.”

She must have looked the word up. “Soul.”

“Ah.” She seemed remorseful at having mispronounced it. “And I, too, have sensitive soul,” she continued, “that you will return to us.”

“Maybe you mean ‘impression’?”

“Yes. It is osud. ”

“ Osud is fate.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling, taking his translation for concurrence.

Though he hadn’t quite understood, he was reluctant to ask her to explain further. It would have been immodest to ask to hear a compliment repeated, and if her interest in his soul was no more than a pretext for proselytizing, maybe he preferred not to see through it. It was possible after all that she had sensed something about him, even if only a penumbra of the sexual freedom that he had kept hidden from her. And it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that he might return some day. Her mysticism fell in with an idea of himself that he wanted to keep as long as he could — of himself as a person on an errand whose nature was still unfolding. When he left, in a few days, he was probably going to have to give the idea up; in America it probably wouldn’t be salutary to go on imagining that he had an exemption from a more definite, a more disillusioned story. He was willing to leave behind with Milena, or with his memory of her, like a thread left behind in a maze, the possibility that his errand could somehow persist despite his abandonment of it, in a disregarded state, incomplete unless someday he found a way to come back to it.

* * *

— What if I were to write you a letter, Milo suggested.

— Well, I’d look forward, Jacob replied.

It was Saturday, the day chosen for the swimming party at Šárka. The two of them were seated aboard a tram that was clattering steadily forward, unimpaired, in accordance with its nature as a mechanical thing, by the heat that they were passing through. Earlier passengers had opened all the windows of the car, and by the tram’s motion a wet air was drawn in, which buffeted ineffectually against their faces, knees, and arms. Jacob had set his backpack on a seat, but Milo was too well mannered to make use of any more seats than the one that he was sitting in, even though they had the car nearly to themselves. Milo’s towel was slung over one of his shoulders, and he had begun to sweat a shadow under it, as well as a circle in the front of his shirt.