Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

* * *

It was late morning when they settled into their train compartment, and they collapsed at once into the pleasant, premature fatigue that follows a successful morning departure, especially one achieved with only minutes to spare — by the time they had reached the train station, they had been cheerfully shouting at each other to hurry — and that serves as a kind of blanket to protect the traveler from the strangeness and emptiness that follow.

They had the compartment to themselves. Once outside Prague, they saw that a light frost lay on the ground, not on the exposed clay of the railroad embankment itself but on the grasses that rolled away from it. The modernity of the city had stopped abruptly at its border; the train was carrying them through pastures, farmlands, and occasionally a village — a few boxy white stucco houses and a rusty car in the crook of a hill’s elbow. The steady, muffled clatter of the train reassured and calmed them. “Kontroll bíjety,” a boyish conductor announced, in European pidgin, as he slid open their compartment door on its rattling casters and propped it open, somewhat rakishly, with one foot.

“Prosím,” Annie said, surrendering her ticket, and asked Jacob, aside, “Do they think we’re German now?”

“I do not think, that you are German,” the conductor interposed.

“Sorry, I had no idea you spoke English. How rude of me.”

“Not at all, madam.” He tipped his hat and was gone.

They decided to eat the lunches they had packed, though it was still a little early. Annie had brought a thermos of coffee, hot, and another of milk, cold, and an extra cup for Jacob. She also had oranges, a salad of cucumber and tomatoes, and a tin of sardines. Jacob, who abstained from the sardines, had brought a soft cheese, a salami that had recommended one day when their paths crossed at the butcher’s, and half a loaf of bread, as well as a knife to cut them with, wrapped for safety in his towel, since the knife didn’t fold. For dessert he had brought two small plastic pots of smetanový krém , a sort of sweetened crème fraîche.

“We’d have had to eat soon anyway,” Jacob rationalized, “because the krém wouldn’t have stayed cold.”

“You know it’s for children, Jacob. I mean, with ladybirds and butterflies and such like on the packages.”

They dozed; they read. At the border the train stopped for half an hour while two teams of border guards, first larkish Czechs and then impassive Germans, inspected passports. As the train drifted into motion again, Jacob sat up to see if the landscape would change, and it did: now all the roofs of the little houses were red, as if by regulation. The trees were more neatly trimmed and even, in places, pollarded. Cars, when he saw them, were brightly polished. By a subtle change, the hills, which were steeper, and the villages, which were even more ingeniously placed, now looked strangely familiar to Jacob, who recalled that his great-grandfather had immigrated to Texas from Germany and that his grandmother knew German because it had been spoken in her childhood home. He wondered if it was here that he ought to have come in the first place.

Annie interrupted his reverie. “Is your heart set on Berlin, then?”

“I thought yours was.”

She leaned toward the window for a better view, tugging the gray-green curtain out of her way with a quick hand, and her face was lit up by a reflection from a field of uncut straw. “It’s just that it’s something of a challenge to go back to a place sometimes. I wish you would come tonight after all.” They had discussed this. She had a plan to meet some of her old friends, and Jacob had decided to explore Berlin’s gay nightlife. “Instead of foraging.”

“Foraging?”

“Pillaging. Whatever it is that you do. But you need to make up your mind too, I suppose.”

“You could come with me.”

“No, I would have to face them eventually if I moved here. I’ll go by myself. I only asked the ones I want to see.”

They fell silent. Annie slipped off her shoes and pulled her feet up beside her on the banquette. The train slowed but did not stop for a small station house in yellow stone with a mansard roof and bricked-up windows.

“You know, in some ways I find it’s much better in Prague than it was for me in Berlin. It’s more steady, with the group that we have.”

“We don’t have to move.”

When they alighted at Berlin Lichtenberg, they quarreled, because Annie wanted to board an elevated train just pulling in upstairs, and Jacob, feeling cautious, insisted on standing in front of the grand transit map of the city posted beside the ticket booth and puzzling out their route. According to the map, more than one elevated train passed through the station, as well as an underground train. But that was as much as Jacob could figure out. Before leaving Prague, he had memorized the name of the stop nearest the tourist bureau where they hoped to reserve inexpensive rooms, and he couldn’t find it anywhere on the map.

“I don’t understand.”

“How peculiar,” Annie agreed, after he had asked her to help him search and she too had failed.

They felt rising in them the slow panic that hunger for dinner brings in travelers who don’t yet know where they are going to sleep. A German man, as if sensing their anxiety, came forward offering “Zimmer, zimmer,” but they waved him away. It was a gray, cheerless station; the floors were dusty and the paint was peeling off the walls. Jacob marched them outside, over Annie’s protests, in search of a street sign so that he could locate them on a map of the two Berlins that he had bought in Prague. The burden of their luggage aggravated their sense of unease and vulnerability. The street name they found wasn’t listed in the index of Jacob’s map.

“I’m not going any farther, Jacob. Shall we go back inside and ask at the ticket window?”

The ticket seller took money from them and pointed to the track where Annie had wanted to board the elevated in the first place.

“I told you.”

“I thought people would speak English here,” Jacob said.

“Oh, they do, in Berlin. But this is East Berlin, and very much so, in my opinion.”

Inside the elevated train, a new transit map explained the mystery: Before unification, the transit systems of East and West Berlin had intersected at only one station. Only that station had appeared on the maps of both cities; there had been no need to remind riders of the existence of places they could not visit. In the new map, the two webs now touched along one filament, hesitantly, and Jacob was able to see both the station where they had boarded and the one near the tourist bureau. He saw, too, that the map that he’d bought in Prague had been no help because it didn’t really show both cities; it showed only as much of East Berlin as was unavoidably included by a rectangle large enough to contain all of West Berlin. It was merely an old map of West Berlin that had been opportunistically relabeled.

The eastern city lay below, in white, cold, massive buildings that turned away from them like the spokes of a great turbine as the elevated train took a curve. The architecture looked as grand and sober as cemetery marble.

“There’s no one about, is there,” Annie remarked. “But then it’s midday in winter. You know, we could have stayed in East Berlin. It would have been less dear.”

“Absolutely not.”

“You sometimes give the impression that you don’t much care for socialism, Jacob.”

The western city now wheeled toward them, and they saw that it was crawling with traffic and spotted with advertising. The quiet in the car around them became fragile, like an egg to be cracked.