Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Ivan must have recognized Jacob’s unwillingness to struggle, because he admitted him after only half an hour.

“I forgot your cassette,” Jacob said, as he sat down next to Ota.

“Is okay, my friend.” Tonight Ota was wearing a lime-green Oxford shirt, which called out what was sallow in his features. “‘Some day,’ as the Americans say instead of good-bye.”

“Is that what they say?”

“That is what they say to me. But perhaps they do not say it to everyone.” He pulled an elbow behind his head with one hand, so the other could scratch between his shoulder blades. There were shadows under his eyes.

“It’s as if I never went away,” Jacob said, looking over the crowd. “I wonder if it will always be this way.”

“Oh yes, everyone is always here,” Ota agreed, inattentively.

“Not everyone. I don’t see your friend Milo.”

“Do you like Milo?” he asked, and then he shrugged. “He is a good boy, and so I do not know where he is tonight.” He let his head loll to one side, like a puppet whose string has been dropped. “And where were you, that you went away?”

“Berlin. I was thinking of moving there, but I’m not going to.”

“Ah, Deutschland. And why did you not like it?”

“I don’t know. The people there are kind of hard.”

“They are the hardest people in the world, and Americans are the softest, and between the two there is equal danger.”

“It sounds as if someone has been breaking your heart.”

“You are always breaking my heart, Kuba, but do not joke about it tonight.”

A song ended, and a few of Ota’s acolytes came in from the dance floor, like Fagin’s children returning from the streets. They gave Jacob nods of recognition. One pushed toward Ota a rum and cola he had brought him from the bar.

“Do you know if Luboš is coming tonight?” Jacob asked.

“And how would I know this, Kuba?” The faces of his acolytes were so cautious that Jacob couldn’t tell whether they were following the exchange. “Luboš, Luboš,” Ota complained.

“I haven’t spoken to him for a few weeks,” Jacob said, and blushed as if he were admitting to an embarrassing desire.

“There is mystery with him, yes?” Ota answered. “You are always beginning to know him, only.”

“He is always virgin again,” risked one of the boys.

“Shut up,” ordered Ota. “Kuba is also always virgin.” He stroked Jacob’s hand once, and only once, protectively, and then laughed the moment away.

A couple of beers later, Jacob’s eye paused on an unassuming suit, and then he recognized the dry features of the man wearing it. Collin was talking to a man younger than he was, but not so much younger as to belong without effort to the bar’s circulation of glances and poses. Collin had been standing there long enough to fall into the stillness and economy of gesture of a hunter in a blind. Jacob had probably looked at him a number of times without seeing him.

“Ah, not him, Kuba,” Ota advised, as Jacob rose.

“But he might know,” Jacob answered, and confident with alcohol and the lateness of the hour, he made his way toward Collin, across the bar.

— Pardon me, Jacob said in French. Since neither man acknowledged him, he repeated himself. — Pardon me.

Collin nodded, and his companion turned his eyes on Jacob.

— No one has introduced us, but I believe you know a friend of mine, Jacob said.

— I wasn’t aware of it, Collin answered. He gave no encouragement to proceed.

— I had the impression that you knew Luboš.

— Yes, I know him. He didn’t bother to meet Jacob’s eye, though his companion watched Jacob steadily. Jacob realized that because his French, however stiff, was better than his Czech, he was able to feel the chill in Collin’s manner more sharply than he could feel it with someone like Ivan the doorman.

— I have not heard any news of Luboš lately, Jacob continued, feeling he had nothing to lose, and then, wanting to provoke Collin, he added: —Is he in France again?

— No, Collin answered. He showed no surprise at Jacob’s knowledge, and no curiosity about it, just as he had shown none when Jacob had begun by addressing him in French.

— Do you know how I might get in touch with him?

— I’m afraid I can’t help you. You will excuse me, there is a matter I was discussing with my colleague.

They waited for Jacob to leave.

“I don’t understand,” Jacob admitted when he returned to Ota’s table.

“Cough on him, as we say,” Ota advised. “He is not a suitable person.”

* * *

Jacob tried Luboš’s number one more time the next afternoon.

“Moment,” said the man who picked up. “Message.”

Jacob didn’t know whether he was going to be given a message or asked to leave one. The line was silent for almost a full minute. Finally he tried to speak again and was again interrupted.

“Moment, moment,” the man said sternly. Then, more gently and more slowly, “Tomorrow, Sunday, fourteen hours. Under clock. Yes?”

Jacob repeated the details back, the phone trembling against his ear.

The hour was at the center of a bright, cold afternoon. Jacob arrived early. Across the plaza, in front of the glass-walled pastry shop, four Czech teenagers were singing in English. A small crowd ringed them, composed of as many Czechs as tourists; there were few tourists now that the days had grown short. Jacob’s coat had at last come, and he was wearing it — seal-gray, polyester, with lumpy padding, still musty from the closet in central Massachusetts where it had been stored.

He was looking in the window of a bookstore — a strict one, where you were allowed to walk through the aisles in one direction only — and wondering if he had time to see whether they had a Czech-English dictionary in stock yet, when he heard Luboš salute him.

He was the most handsome man in sight, as always. — But you are early, Luboš noted.

— And you, ‘late but nevertheless,’ Jacob answered. It was one of the mottoes of last November’s revolution.

— I am not late, Kuba. I am precise, as a good Czech. He looked Jacob over frankly, as if for him, too, the interval had dissolved a resistance he hadn’t known consciously how to overcome. In his smile Jacob saw a chipped front tooth. It gave Jacob a pang to think that he hadn’t noticed it earlier and never would have, if they hadn’t managed this reunion.

— You have something…, Jacob said, tapping his own tooth.

— That happened when I was a child. He covered his mouth with a hand, as if to press it shut. Then he smiled again, abandoning the effort. — At least I am not a vampire, he added. This was a reference to Jacob’s eyeteeth. Their first night together, he had discovered that Jacob felt both bashful and proud of the teeth’s prominence.

— I am happy, that we are seeing each other, Jacob said, because he was bursting with it and felt that he had to say so.

— I too. I missed you. In Czech, missing had to be said in the thirdperson singular, like raining, and so Luboš didn’t seem to reveal as much by the confession as he would have in English. But it touched Jacob anyway. He again had the sense that a barrier between them had fallen. He hoped it was that he no longer seemed so young to Luboš. He stepped on Luboš’s foot because he couldn’t think of another way to touch him in the open square.

On Národní , a gallery was exhibiting the hand-drawn typography of a Czech illustrator, and Jacob proposed seeing it.

— He is the author of a children’s book, that everyone read, said Luboš.

— I didn’t know that, Jacob admitted. — I liked the poster, simply.