Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

A window in the bedroom faced west onto a small lawn, a sidewalk, and a jagged concrete wall that protected the house from the noise and dirt of a highway. A window in the kitchen faced east onto a courtyard where Mrs. Stehlíková hung the laundry on Wednesdays and where beat the family’s rugs on weekends, stagily coughing, waving, and blinking to entertain herself. Someone had put a woven red tablecloth in the kitchen, to brighten the room, and Jacob was slowly ruining it with a candle that he lit at his dinners to cheer himself up. He hadn’t thought to put down a plate to catch the wax until too late.

He had only himself for company. Sometimes he had the feeling, which one may have if one lives alone, that time had paused for him, though perhaps in this apartment only, as if, canoeing along Time, he had turned into a still inlet. The rooms were the same from day to day, uninterrupted. Was the feeling a safe or a dangerous one? He would turn on the hot water tap in the kitchen just to hear the soft boom as a large purple flower of gas ignited and then focused in the tall white metal heater near the ceiling. There was a similar heater in the bathroom, larger and even more ebullient in its ignitions. If he was at home when the sun set, he would sit on the floor in a corner of the bedroom, his back against the couch’s front, eyes closed, a glass of water folded between his hands in his lap, and let the light warm his face and arms. He always got up just before the light was going to pass, so he would not have the feeling of its leaving him.

The sight of the pig had taken away his appetite, but there would be no food in the apartment unless he went to the stores before they closed, so he picked up his small backpack and headed out.

In the hallway, he met , who was just returning from the stores, her mesh bag in hand.

— I go for food, he said in his simple Czech.

“You do not want…,” she began in English, and rolled her eyes toward the hanging cadaver. “How do you say?”

“Pork?” Jacob supplied. — Maybe later, he added in Czech. — But it’s pretty.

— Pretty? She blinked and stepped back from it, her frizzy black hair aquiver. — It’s large, she declared, — and dreadful.

“Who has to butcher it?” he asked in English, with a little sawing gesture, which she watched with horror.

— Mother and I. She smiled at him fixedly as if the injustice of it were the best part.

— That is dreadful, really.

She shrugged. “You want to help, perhaps?” she asked, in English again.

“Oh no, no. You’d better go ahead and start without me.”

She echoed the sentence, to teach herself the phrase, then answered him: “Okay.” In her voice he could hear her pride in knowing the American word.

* * *

In the shadow of the ugly sheltering wall it was cold, and Jacob was sorry he hadn’t put on his sweatshirt under his raincoat. He didn’t have his real winter clothes yet; his mother was going to mail them soon. Three houses down, a border collie ran to the fence as he approached and began to bark industriously. PES, read a little tin sign in black and white. Evil dog, was the literal translation. Jacob could see in the collie’s eyes that if the fence hadn’t been there it would have let him pass quietly. The fence was a kind of permission to bark, maybe even an obligation. As soon as Jacob stepped past the yard, the collie fell silent and trotted back to its doormat on the front steps, where it curled up to save its warmth.

None of the laws liberalizing commerce had yet gone into effect, so the stores were still run on the old system and bore their old, plain names: foodstuffs; meat; fruits and vegetables; frozen goods. As if to emphasize their plainness, the words appeared on the signs in lower-case. The stores were lodged in an L-shaped, two-story mall of rough cement. Jacob pushed through a delicate chrome turnstile to enter the largest one, which was on the ground floor. There were only three aisles, and most of the shelves were empty. In the back, however, there was a great mound of bottled beer, without any labels on the brown glass; only the metal caps told you the brand was Staropramen, which Jacob liked. It was absurdly cheap, but it was absurdly cheap in pubs and bars, too, so Jacob never bought any here. There were no spare shopping baskets, because it was the end of the day and the store was crowded, so Jacob cradled in the crook of his left arm the groceries he found: a rectangular paper sack of rice, a jar of half-pickled red cabbage, a brick of butter in foil, and milk in a clear plastic bag with blue stenciling. With tongs he put into a small white paper sack five rohlíky , Czech croissants, slightly pasty in flavor. They were straight, like swollen fingers, because at some point, under socialism, the traditional curve had been eliminated as frivolous. He approached a board where sour brown bread was stacked. He wanted a quarter loaf, which he risked picking up with a bare hand. Last, at an unplugged refrigerator cabinet against the wall, he picked up a white paper sack of eggs. The sack was the same kind as for rohlíky , but with six eggs already inside, the top neatly crimped shut. He balanced it on the bag of milk, reasoning that the milk might provide cushioning, like a waterbed.

The cashier wrote out his total on a scrap of paper as she pronounced it, because she knew he didn’t understand numbers yet, and then fished the correct change out of his open palm. She sighed as she did it. He felt childish and trusting. There was no greed here, it sometimes seemed. There must be, of course, but sometimes it did seem that there wasn’t. Upstairs, afterward, he bought some sausage to fry, and in the vegetables-and-fruits store across the street he found some onions and salad greens.

In his apartment he made himself a plate of scrambled eggs, two slices of sausage, and salad. He lit his candle and read a chapter of La Chartreuse de Parme . After night fell, he looked up to see that his reflection in the dark window looked like a Dutch painting: young man, candle, fork on empty plate, book. Of course it wasn’t Dutch; there was no wife and no wealth. Only the illusion of time held in place. He stood up and drew the heavy orange curtains.

* * *

According to the pages on Eastern Europe that he had torn from a guide to gay life abroad purchased in Boston — burying the rest of the book at the bottom of a garbage bag full of food scraps soon after, so that no one would inadvertently come upon its advertisements for massage parlors and bath houses — there were two gay bars in Prague, and the one not described as “rough” was to be found in a street one block long near the foot of Wenceslas Square. After his last class on Friday, he made pancakes and ate them with a can of , which he had spotted in the window of a store near school, and which he thought were blueberries, since they looked and tasted like them. (They were bilberries, he discovered years later, when he had a better dictionary.) He showered, brushed the blue off his teeth, and slipped his Penguin Typee , a book he had brought with him from Boston intact, into the pocket of his raincoat. It was a long tram ride to the subway.

The tram was nearly empty. Most residents of the outlying neighborhood where he lived stayed home on a Friday night. He looked out the window idly. The tram ran through a manufacturing district, and for a mile or so there was nothing to see but low, gray, cement-covered walls and long sheets of corrugated metal, ineffectually undermined by weeds. Intermittently, a wall gave way to a fence, and then a gate, through whose iron bars one could see the tall front of a factory. STANDARDS AND QUALITY FOR EVERYONE EVERYWHERE, read a slogan over the door of one of the factories. Further on, the tram ran past a housing development — a group of dirty white concrete high-rises, called paneláky .