Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— You could translate.

— I am a terrible translator, even of German. I am only good enough for this, to help a businessman from abroad. Forgive me. Do not worry; I am not going to cry over it.

He looked fixedly at Jacob as if daring him to look away. He seemed to be appealing to Jacob for once as an equal, and it filled Jacob with lust. He wanted to pin Luboš to the building they were leaning against. — Do you really need this other man? Jacob asked. In Czech, “the other” is literally “the second,” so Jacob specified, perhaps unnecessarily: —This third man.

— His name is on all the forms. His name and mine. The Frenchman’s name is nowhere. And we need him even aside from this. All is in great disorder.

“Je to bordel,” Jacob said in sympathy. Bordel was a mildly vulgar word, which used to describe anything it was her duty to clean up. A mess, as in a brothel.

— You speak Czech so prettily now, Luboš said. — Like a cabdriver.

At two o’clock, a few Czech officials seated themselves in folding chairs on stage. Two wore ill-fitting suits, and a third a patterned sweater. It was still a rare thing to see formal clothes of any kind on the streets of Prague. There were almost none for sale in the stores. As a sort of a joke, Jacob sometimes wore a beige knit tie, which he’d thrown into his knapsack in Boston at the last minute, but he almost never saw a tie on other men. The absence was a relief. No one’s clothes signaled that they lived better or higher than you, or that their style was more current. The men on stage, for example, were probably government ministers, but they dressed like clerks in a discount shoe store. A Thoreauvian intellectual might live a little to one side, under such an arrangement, without looking any shabbier than the rest of society. The peculiarity of his ambition would not be visible.

Another official came to the microphone and announced that President Bush had been unpreventably delayed and would appear as soon as he was able to. After a few minutes, the seated officials exchanged glances, rose, and filed sheepishly off stage. The crowd seemed to pardon them; it was, after all, a very cold day.

The people in the square fell into the long patience customary in those awaiting a ceremony rather than an entertainment. The music gave them a sense of progress. During the silence after each song, they listened intently, and then, as the next song started, relaxed again into chatter and into fidgeting for warmth. At intervals one of the officials repeated the announcement of the president’s delay and the assurance that he was en route. It pleased Jacob to think of himself as hidden in the crowd — not recognizably American.

— Your president is as punctual as you.

— I didn’t vote for him.

— You were, perhaps, too young.

— Punishably young, Jacob joked.

— I’m not afraid, Luboš returned. — The socialist republics are enlightened about youth. You are old enough here to cast your vote as you wish, in that respect at least.

It was not until four that the Czech officials returned to the stage. This time they remained standing, their hands clasped before them, as if so instructed, while men from the American Secret Service, much more sharply tailored, took the corners of the stage and studied the crowd. Havel’s foreign minister next emerged, followed, at last, by the American president and his entourage. After an introduction, the president read in his plaintive, nasal voice from a short script, pausing for the interpreter at the end of each clause with a practiced air, as if he himself found the resonance of the phrases reassuring and even enjoyed their echo in another language. He said only platitudes, yet Jacob felt nonetheless a prickling on the back of his neck at the old words in their Yankee cadences, and a pride in thinking that his was the country invited to represent democracy, not France or Britain. Later, when he learned a little history, he realized that the Czechs and Slovaks couldn’t have invited the leaders of those countries; in 1938, Daladier and Chamberlain had betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler. At the time, though, he only understood America’s presence in Bush’s person vaguely, and not altogether inaccurately, as a recognition of something like its purity of spirit.

In their mere politeness, the president’s words left the crowd with nothing to discuss, and when the stage was cleared, people fell thoughtlessly into streets and arcades that would take them away from the square. Jacob felt a little giddy. He was at the right distance from his country, he thought. This was where he wanted to see it from. Even the insipidity of Bush’s speech pleased him; it reflected America’s stability and confidence, and it suggested that it was safe to stay away. There weren’t going to be any turns in the story that he’d want to be on hand for. In the general dispersal, he and Luboš drifted north and soon found themselves in view of the chief train station, named for Woodrow Wilson. There was a park in front, which Jacob hadn’t noticed before. At this time of year the flowerbeds were empty, but on the northern side of the park there were crudely trimmed shrubs and a thin shelter of trees.

— Kuba, what are you looking for? Luboš asked.

— I want to see the statue.

He was already ten paces ahead of Luboš. He could tell it wasn’t really a nice park. At the edges of the sidewalk, wind had collected cigarette butts and wrinkled wads of the wax paper that fries and mayonnaise were served in. It occurred to Jacob that he didn’t often see litter in downtown Prague. This trash came from the train station, probably. In a minute he would let Luboš lead him away, but first he wanted to take a closer look at the statue, which seemed to represent a soldier in a flowing coat standing beside — yes, how strange — standing beside another man, and embracing him.

— It is unsuitable here, Luboš said, awkwardly, upon catching up.

There was no plaque. Jacob walked around the statue, to see it from all angles. The soldier’s rifle, hanging from a shoulder strap, fell between the men, separating them like the mythic sword that lovers are always sleeping on either side of, and the soldier’s left leg strode forward, decisively, as if to signal that the embrace would not slow his march. The stride turned the soldier’s cock and balls chastely away from his admirer, who seemed to be rushing toward him with a desperate hunger.

— Do you know, what it is? Jacob asked.

— It is for the liberation from the Germans.

Now Jacob saw the Soviet star on the breast of the soldier’s uniform. The Russian, who was taller, had to bend his head deeply to place his kiss, which was sheltered by the men’s arms. The Czech’s face, too, was almost entirely obscured. Jacob wondered if it were possible to enjoy the statue the way tourists did when they bought Soviet Army overcoats and badges on Charles Bridge — as a trophy of sorts, and as kitsch. But he decided that the passion it represented was too bodily; there could be no room in his understanding of it for irony, except at the expense of the aspect that most interested him. An image had been widely circulated, the year before, of Honecker and Brezhnev kissing; Jacob saw that one could make that kind of joke about this statue. He didn’t want to, yet he was not ready to see himself in the statue, either.

— Are they lovers? Jacob asked.

— I don’t know, Luboš said. — It is not good to be here.

— Why not?

— Because of men from the train station. Men and boys.

Jacob shrugged. — Such people aren’t dangerous. Is the statue pleasing to you?