Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

He found her sitting in the back row, sharing her textbooks with a bald man who had forgotten his. Neither she nor Jacob betrayed to the other students that he lived in her parents’ house; she gave her name with the others, neutrally, when he asked the students to introduce themselves.

After reviewing an exercise set by the regular teacher, he wrote the poem on the blackboard, his hands shaking, as they always did before strangers. He then asked them to say what they thought the pronouns referred to, taking them one by one.

That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet.

Believing what we don’t believe

Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best

An ablative estate—

This instigates an appetite

Precisely opposite.

When he called on , she said, “Já?”—me? — and pointed at herself, wide-eyed. But she was able to say when “it” was life, and when afterlife, and what it is we don’t believe. Slowly the class unriddled the poem, which Jacob liked because the ambivalence in it was so fine, and the ambiguities so few. It was odd, too, in being composed almost purely of ideas; it had so little in it of the sweet world whose loss concerned it, except perhaps in its sound, which was like a nursery rhyme’s.

After class, he found Annie at the top of the stairs, trying to shift her cassette player and manila folders into her knapsack before they slipped from her hands.

“May I?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s grand, thanks. In these shoes I need a free hand for the banister.” A tall, south-facing window — a modern rectangle of Gothic narrowness — lit the stairwell with thin cold light, which burned into a filament a straw-colored plait that fell over her eyes. “Do you keep to the curricular schedule, Jacob? I don’t see how I’m going to catch up. Today I had them pronounce words that end in B and G and so on, because not one of them could say ‘dog.’ They say ‘doc,’ have you noticed?”

Thom was waiting for them in the lounge. “Annie, my love, you don’t happen to have any of those apricot pastries left on your hands, by any chance?”

“Did you try the little shop across the way?”

“I did, but the schoolgirls have eaten them all up.”

“You have to go quite early,” Annie told him. “What will you offer in exchange, then? I’ve only four left.”

“Only four! I can offer a Sparta.”

“Mmm. They’re rather rough on the back of the throat, I find. I always feel afterward as if I’m coming down with something.”

Jacob donated a Marlboro light instead, which liberated two pastries, one for him and one for Thom.

“Is it true what Michael says, that he’s going back to Edinburgh because you’ve found a Czech girlfriend and now he has to drink alone?”

“Michael’s going back to sign on, is what he must have meant to say, before Thatcher and her lot do away with the dole altogether and he misses his chance.”

“I had no idea you were such a conservative,” Annie said.

“I think a working man has a right to know his tax monies are not ill-spent.”

“What’s her name, then?”

“Jana.” He said it shyly.

“A proper Czech name. She sounds quite nice.”

“She is that, yes.”

“She would have to be, to put up with such a lot as you. Is she impressionable?”

“Quite her own person, rather.”

“Will we be meeting her?”

“In time. She doesn’t speak much English yet.”

“And I don’t suppose you’re speaking Czech to her. How do you communicate?”

“It’s always possible,” Jacob put in.

“It is, yes,” Thom reflected.

Annie carefully wrapped the last pastry in the white sack she had bought them in. “Did either of you men of the world know that there’s now a paper shortage? Your man in the shop, there, was reluctant to give me this sack. I had to plead with him for it. That’s why I bought so many. It was šest or nothing.”

“What will you do,” Jacob asked, “if she falls in love with you?”

“I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves,” Thom protested.

“Sorry,” said Jacob.

“Of course she will, though,” said Annie. “You’re such a lad, Thom, not to think of that.”

* * *

President Bush was coming to Prague for the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and Jacob invited Luboš to be his date for the celebration in Wenceslas Square. They met under the clock of the disco, as was now their custom. The president was not scheduled to speak until two, but at noon the streets were already full. It was a national holiday, and the crowd was merry. A man in a Mao suit was selling a card game called Marxeso, which was played like Concentration; the object was to turn over matching pairs of twentieth-century dictators, who were Communist except for Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein. Girls in peasant dresses were selling cheaply printed copies of the United States Constitution in Czech. The week before, Jacob had tried to teach his students the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, but the difference did not tell here; Bush was being welcomed in a general and symbolic capacity.

Jacob offered to treat Luboš to pizza at a new, Western-style place near the subway entrance. It was a restaurant where you stood to eat. A waitress came quickly once they found an end free at one of the high tables.

— Was it like this here last year? Jacob asked.

— No, people were afraid then, Luboš said. — The police were beating people. Today it is like a game.

— So you were here.

— A little, he said, as he had before.

The dough was chewy, and the tomato sauce heavily sweetened. Soon they were climbing uphill toward a blue-painted stage that had been erected at the top of the square. Government loudspeakers, mounted in the façades of the buildings like fleurons of gunmetal, had been turned on again for the occasion, and one or two of them crackled meaninglessly because of a short circuit, already out of repair after just a year’s disuse.

Luboš seemed to be studying the paving stones.

— You’re silent, Jacob accused.

— I’m nervous. He glanced around them before explaining: He and Collin had a third partner, another Czech, who had recently gone missing, just as they were about to sign a lease and hand floor plans over to a builder. Luboš had been asked to apply for extensions on all the permissions and licenses that the business required, a task in some ways more difficult than applying for them in the first place.

— Where is he? Jacob asked.

— We do not know. Please tell no one.

— Whom would I tell?

They stood together awkwardly, leaning against a building a few numbers up from the Hotel Evropa. From time to time Jacob tried to stand on the ledge of a sort of false plinth in the building’s façade, as if he wanted a better view, but in fact as a pretext for putting a hand on Luboš’s shoulder.

— What will you do, when you return? Luboš asked.

— That’s far off, Jacob answered lightly.

— Not so far, I think. Will you return to the office, where you worked?

— No. In fact Jacob dreaded the burden of earning a living. To be here was something more than a holiday; it was a kind of rift in the net, so new that it was not yet clear how it would be rewoven into the systems of money and responsibility. — I want to write, Jacob added.

— Ah yes. Does it pay?

— No, not now.

A brass band’s rendition of John Philip Sousa issued from speakers above their heads, too loudly at first. Then came George M. Cohan. The embassy must have provided a mix tape. — I too do not know, what I will do, Luboš said, in the Czech he kept simple for Jacob’s sake. — Especially if Collin’s business does not succeed.