Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

After the morning sun, the upstairs hallway of the hostel seemed dim and its air stale, like an invalid’s room. Jacob’s footfalls were involuntarily quieted by the carpet. He didn’t think Annie would still be asleep, and he knocked on her door, which he came to before his own.

“Hello? Who’s there?” he heard her ask from within, in a timid voice. He would have pictured an old woman if he hadn’t known her.

“It’s me. It’s Jacob.”

He heard the deadbolt thrown, and the doorknob turned, but she didn’t unlatch the small chain at eye level until she saw him. “Jeez, you frightened me. I didn’t know who it was.”

“Who did you think?”

She wandered back into the small room, searching among her unpacked clothes and makeup and open, facedown books and the washed-out containers from their train-board lunch for the ashtray where she had set her cigarette. “I had no idea, really. You weren’t in when I knocked a short while ago, so I didn’t think it could be you.”

“I’m just getting in.”

“So I gather.” She bounced gently down on the bed beside her suitcase and squinted at him through the smoke. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, I can see that you are, now.”

He wanted to tell her about it, but she wanted breakfast first. They found a place on the next street and ordered eggs and tea. He narrated his adventure while they ate.

“How much is it in crowns, do you think?” Annie asked when the bill came.

Jacob had to figure it into dollars first, before he could answer. It was about three days’ salary.

“It’s on me,” he volunteered. “I happen to have the deutschmarks.”

“You’ll need them soon enough. Aren’t you going to buy a pair of blue jeans?”

“They aren’t my deutschmarks. Markus gave them to me for cab fare, and I didn’t use them all.”

“Well, I won’t stop you if you want to disembarrass yourself of them.”

“There’s only change left,” Jacob assured her, and showed it to her in his palm.

She hadn’t finished her tea, and they were both reluctant to start the business part of their day, asking for work in language schools, so they sat a little longer.

“Are you still seeing your Czech friend?” Annie asked, to make conversation.

“He stood me up the other day.”

“Oh?” She clinked a spoon idly in her cup. “Perhaps he’s a little afraid of you.”

“No, no.”

“You needn’t become alarmed. I’m not saying he’s afraid of anything you might do.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, more quietly, thinking she meant he was an outsider, who would eventually leave. “You haven’t told me anything about your evening,” he continued, to change the subject.

“Oh, haven’t I?” she said. “It was fine, as you Americans say. ‘Fine.’”

“That’s good,” Jacob responded, but he was not so inattentive as to believe her. “Where should we go first?” he asked. “There are a couple of language schools over on the Ku’damm.”

“Oh, are there?” she echoed, uncertainly. Jacob had noticed the addresses on billboards the night before, on his way to Kreuzberg. They hadn’t otherwise prepared at all. In Prague Jacob hadn’t needed to. On his third day in the city, frustrated by a broken pay phone on the street, he had stepped into an office building to ask where he could find a phone that worked. The building’s porter had listened to him ask his question in English and in French, and had then directed him by gestures to the third floor, where, instead of a pay phone, Jacob had found the municipal office for foreign language instruction. The porter had thought Jacob had known where he was. Within an hour, he had signed a contract for a year’s employment.

“I don’t know as I’m up for it, Jacob, I’m sorry,” Annie said.

“We have to try, at least,” he insisted, thinking with confidence how easy it had been in Prague. “Today’s our only weekday. The worst they can do is say no, and if they do we’ll just ask which of their competitors has low standards and might take us.”

“It isn’t that.” She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, I’m a right eejit.”

Now she was crying but working to stop herself. “What is an eejit, anyway,” he asked. “Is it like a git?”

“You know, an eejit. A person who does a thing everyone knows he shouldn’t do, but everyone knows he will do, anyway.” In the act of explaining, her composure began to come back to her.

“Like an idiot.”

“It’s not as cold as that.” He waited; she drank a little of her tea. “So I went to the bar, to meet my friends,” she continued. “And there was this man, whom I used to be with. I didn’t think he’d be there, or I wouldn’t have gone. An awfully fine man. He was on the stuff, we all were, a little, when I was here before. Which made it rather carefree.”

“And you had some last night.”

“What do you take me for, Jacob? I may be an eejit, but I’m not bloody stupid.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” she said. “But that’s just it, as it happens. If I came back, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t, in the end. Which would spoil it. The memory isn’t all bad, you see. But it’s the having left that keeps it from being all bad, if you understand what I’m saying.”

She seemed fragile and brave. “Let’s not move to Berlin, then,” he said. “It was you who brought me here.”

“I didn’t see my way, then.”

“It’s okay,” he said. But he wondered if he really could give up what he had caught a glimpse of.

“You haven’t fallen in love, have you.”

“No, no,” he said. “I wanted to see, is all.”

He continued for a while to assure her that he didn’t want to stay, but in the end they decided he might as well take a look at the language schools. There was no harm in his exploration.

* * *

The interviewers were concerned that he couldn’t speak German. They were disappointed that he had no training. They doubted that they could help him obtain a work permit.

“There’ll be something for you, if you want it,” Annie said, gamely. “Are you willing to wait tables and such like? I could ask my friends. They’re bound to know of something.”

“How can I wait tables in English? No, don’t ask them yet.” He didn’t think she much wanted to see her friends again so soon, and he was hoping that Markus would have a suggestion. He and Markus had arranged a date for Saturday night.

It was a relief to fall into tourism and shopping until then. A ruined, red-brick church tower seemed to be the center of the city. The high streets were pulled closer to it as they approached, as if by a kind of magnetism. The plaza where the tower stood was ringed by glassy stores, some of a great height, which seemed to have encouraged one another, with glances and nudges, to come as close as they dared to the old ogre, still standing despite an ugly hole in her head, and then, because the ogre didn’t topple but continued monotonously to stand, they had lost interest in her and had begun to amuse themselves instead with one another, with gossip and barter.

Jacob and Annie didn’t go inside the tower because there was an admission fee. “When you live here, you just piss money away,” Annie observed. “But it isn’t the same if you’re going back to Prague.” As Friday turned into Saturday, it became clear that they couldn’t really afford anything. Everything was an extravagance, if calculated in crowns, and the business of filling their time with leisure — the purchases of a snack, a bus ticket, a postcard — took on an unreal character, as if they were paying a visit at great expense to selves no longer their own, to selves that they would not really be able to return to until they had given up on Prague for good, whenever that was. To make these selves speak from exile they had to spill money recklessly, like Odysseus pouring blood into a hole in the ground in the underworld. Whenever they stopped spending, they seemed to be walking in a fairy city where they were invisible, or looking through a grandparent’s pair of eyeglasses, too strong, at a world strenuously sharp and distant.