Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Jacob opened the refrigerator and stared into it vacantly, with the false purposefulness that lingers for a few moments when a person of a solitary nature is released from the company of a strong personality. If Mr. Stehlík were to return, Jacob would seem to be planning for dinner. Slowly he came to see the refrigerator’s dull tin shelves for himself rather than through eyes loaned to Mr. Stehlík, and when he returned to himself, he found that he was admiring the row of jams and preserves he had collected in the past few months from stores all over the city: strawberry, gooseberry, apricot, currant, and lingonberry. It was nice to have a different one every time he made pancakes. But he wouldn’t make pancakes again tonight, he decided.

Though it was tomorrow night’s date that was canceled, somehow the news left him feeling cut off from the world tonight, too; the evening ahead seemed long. He decided to try to call Luboš. The pub with the pay phone was across a concrete plaza from the mall of stores, in the direction from which he had just come.

The neighbor’s collie barked furiously. Jacob took a lunging sidestep toward it, because he felt a viciousness in himself tonight, as fierce as the dog’s, and the animal paused for a moment, frightened into silence. But Jacob kept walking, and the dog realized that the challenge was empty — that the fence remained between them — and renewed his barking with even more force.

At the pub, Jacob was told there was no phone. — Outside, a man advised him, and when Jacob walked back outside, he saw that he had walked right past the phone booth, a frail, slender structure with an orange-painted frame and sixteen panes of glass, most of them cracked. A narrow margin of grass had grown up around it, a little wildly, where the municipal lawnmower had evidently not been able to reach. The grass had died with the coming of the cold weather, at about the height of a child.

The apparatus inside was intact and took Jacob’s coin. The call went through; he heard the doubled buzzing that signaled that the phone was ringing in the house of Luboš’s friend. It rang for a long time. As he waited, he remembered a time when he was a boy and had called his best friend repeatedly, as an experiment, asking each time if his friend had picked up the phone on the ring or between rings, until the two of them determined that there was no connection between the ringing sound heard by the caller and the actual rings of the phone called.

— Please, a voice answered, a standard but to Jacob’s ears somewhat officious way to answer the phone in Czech.

— Good evening. Is Luboš there?

— Who’s calling?

— Jacob.

— One moment.

There was scuffling and scratching as the receiver was set down. In a short while the voice returned, now speaking English: “He is away. May I take message?”

— I will call later, Jacob answered, insisting on Czech.

“Do you have telephone?”

— No longer, Jacob said. — I will call again.

The booth’s glass gave some shelter from the wind, and Jacob lingered there after replacing the receiver. And suddenly it was all too much for him. He felt sad and misplaced, with the abrupt, overwhelming, dizzying sadness that comes over people in countries not their own, which has none of the richness of feeling that usually comes with sadness but is rather a kind of exhaustion. It hardly mattered about Luboš, he felt. It wasn’t really Luboš that he missed; it was still Daniel, as it had been before, as perhaps it would always be. As he thought of Daniel, the feelings and circumstances of Boston returned to him with unexpected intensity. He didn’t enjoy remembering them, but they seemed more powerful than he was, and more real than his surroundings. They seemed to establish a context for themselves in the night around him more solid than the rickety booth that he was, rather pointlessly, still standing in. He felt lightheaded, as if he were a little drunk. And like a drunk he became maudlin. That a person like Daniel had taken him up, however briefly, was the only remarkable thing that had ever happened to him. It was stupid of him to be here, so far away.

He would call Daniel. He took his calling card out of his wallet, put another crown in the phone, and dialed his American telephone company’s access number for Czechoslovakia. Since the machine had a rotary dial, he had to say aloud to the operator both his calling card number and Daniel’s number, which he still knew by heart. The phone rang, and his throat tightened, as it always did when he called Daniel, for fear of saying the wrong thing. It would be lunchtime there. He would have to disguise the impulse of the call, he thought hurriedly, because if Daniel knew it, he would express disappointment. But he wanted to confess his impulse and to have Daniel be kind to him for once.

Daniel’s machine answered. Jacob left a plain message, in the hope that Daniel might be home, hear his voice, and pick up, but he didn’t pick up. Jacob finished speaking and was left alone again. The night was putting a chill on him. The same sorrow began to well up in him, but he choked it off, became angry at Daniel for having once more failed him. The familiarity of the anger was a consolation; it was enough of one, at any rate, to carry him back to his rooms, where he was able to make a dinner — some fried sausage, a spoonful of red cabbage from a jar, a peeled carrot, and two toasted and buttered slices of brown caraway-seed bread — and recover some of his strength.

Until bedtime he read Stendhal. He had put it aside when he began to try to learn Czech in earnest, because it was too much of an effort to read a book in one foreign language at the end of a day spent learning another, but now, beside the medieval travelogue he had forced himself to choose at the Clementinum, it seemed the lesser of two evils, and the effort it required helped to abstract him.

He fell asleep with difficulty and awoke a few hours later into an unpleasant and complete alertness. His sleeping mind had somehow stumbled onto the thought that it was possible for him to die here. He wasn’t thinking of any specific threat; it was almost a mathematical sort of realization — the longer he stayed, the higher the odds of dying here — but he wanted to die at home. It frightened him a little to discover he had such a strong opinion about where he wanted to die, and since he was alone, he decided there would be no embarrassment — he wouldn’t be burdening any witnesses with it; there was no Daniel present to construe it as an appeal — in letting himself cry openly.

After a few minutes of this he began to feel better. He got up to wash his face and pour himself a glass of water. Because the feelings in the last few hours had been so potent and their shifts so sudden, it occurred to him to write a short story about them. After all, his development as a writer was the justification he gave himself for staying abroad, and he’d written almost nothing so far. He took a pen and paper and made some notes. He decided to imagine that he had reached Daniel on the telephone. Perhaps the Daniel of the story would feel a little guilty, would worry that his hardness of heart had set Jacob wandering. No, that was implausible; Daniel was beyond guilt. After Jacob had spent the night with him, Daniel had told the story to his boyfriend as an amusement rather than as a confession. Jacob yawned; the anxiety that had awoken him was receding. Perhaps the Daniel of the story could be different, though, more like the Daniel who sometimes surprised him. He had so many thoughts about Daniel, and it had been so long since he had allowed himself to think them. His emotions hadn’t really been engaged here in Prague, only distracted, he said to himself; it had not actually been life. As he set down his pen and returned to bed, he decided he would go with Annie to Berlin.