Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They passed the singers. They also passed under a wrought iron balcony. Melinda had recently pointed it out to Jacob as the place where Havel had stood a year ago when he declared the republic. As they walked, Jacob leaned shoulder to shoulder against Luboš, who, Jacob remembered, either did not know where Havel had stood or had pretended not to. It would be rude to insist on knowing which was the case.

— It is for Juliet, Jacob said, pointing at the balcony. There was something fanciful in its metalwork vines.

— Yes, Romeo, Luboš answered, while he also answered Jacob’s pressure against his shoulder. Perhaps Melinda was misinformed. The balcony seemed to keep a kind of watch over them as it receded.

— You know, I looked for you, Jacob said.

— I know, Collin told me of it.

Jacob took alarm. — Did I make trouble?

— How could you make trouble, Kuba?

— I can, Jacob insisted, but in fact he was relieved to hear that his conversation with Collin hadn’t led to anything.

— I don’t believe.

— I went to Berlin for a weekend, Jacob said, to introduce his proof.

— And you were not a good boy?

— No.

— How so?

— With an actor. Are you angry?

— Very.

— I apologize, Jacob said, flushing.

Luboš hesitated, as if he needed a moment to verify that he wasn’t in earnest and that Jacob was. — I’m only talking nonsense, Kuba. We’re not playing a tragedy.

Jacob inspected Luboš’s face, sideways, not sure whether to believe him.

— With an actor, Luboš echoed. — But you really are very bad. They will have to keep an eye on you.

— Who will? Jacob asked, delightedly.

— They.

— But they don’t exist anymore.

— So think you. Even when you are guilty, it is innocently.

— Oh no, Jacob protested. — You have to leave me something, on which I can stand.

— You are a rascal then. Is that enough for you?

— That’s excellent.

Glass cases along three walls of a gray room told the artist’s story. Upon leaving art school in the 1960s, when the relenting of Communist orthodoxy that followed Stalin’s death seemed finally, a decade late, to be reaching Prague, he had taken a job as a designer and illustrator. He lettered children’s books with a playful, almost flowery script, painted ironic brooches of rubies and garnets as vignettes for a discreet edition of Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels , and designed the jackets for a daring series of pocket-size novellas, several of whose authors were later to become dissidents.

— You understand, after 1968 this was not possible, said Luboš. The artist had never done anything openly political. But after Czechoslovakia’s style of socialism was “normalized” by Russian tanks, the artist took the precaution of working exclusively in the children’s division of his publishing house. In a tamer but still uneven hand, he wrote out the words in innocuous books of Slavic folklore — tales of tricksters and princesses — and in fantasies of elves and goblins by Western writers deemed safe for import. He illustrated an edition of Candide with somber images borrowed from the darker of these fantasies, but a censor thought he saw analogies, and the book was never published. On the gallery wall hung one of the unused drawings; the lines forming the face of the naïf hero seemed like scrawls that converged only by chance, and the hatching over his breast resembled a crossing out. After the setback, the artist retreated further. By the start of the 1980s, he had limited himself to illustrating picture books of typical Czech families living through the small adventures of daily life. He drew and lettered them with an abandonment of control and disregard for finesse that suggested that he, too, was somehow a child, as unformed as the children he wrote for. The blots and unevennesses suggested a child’s intensity of effort. At this point, he decided to risk writing a picture book of his own, adding to the domestic formula only a fluffy dog of an absurdist size and dirtiness.

— Every child in Czechoslovakia loves this dog, Luboš explained.

It had wild eyes and a somehow reassuring shapelessness. — And you? Jacob asked.

— I am too old, said Luboš, with a touch of reproach at having been made to say it. — But it is very sympathetic.

Made bolder by success, the artist applied his new childlike style to illustrations of Tristram Shandy in the late 1980s, taking as his own the wriggling lines that Sterne had drawn to represent the path of his stories. In a dramatic irony, at this moment of return to an adult audience, the artist’s struggle was overtaken by the revolution and he became free to address whomever he wanted.

Luboš was silent as they took in the exhibit, except when they came to a book translated from English, such as an illustration from the 1970s of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, pictured emerging with the Fawn from the wood where things have no name. Then he asked whether Jacob had read it as a child. He was more absorbed than Jacob had expected him to be.

— Do you like the exhibit? Jacob asked.

His studied neutrality returned to his eyes. — I don’t know. It is a little sad, I think.

— Sad, that he could not draw freely? Jacob suggested.

— That is true, but it is also sad that his innocence was genuine, I think.

— But it became knowledge. In the limited vocabulary they shared, Jacob found himself speaking so generally he hardly understood what he was saying.

— A childlike knowledge, which is a kind of promise. But you misunderstand me. It is sad because it will no longer serve.

— Why not?

Luboš shrugged. — And do you like it? he returned the question.

— I do, Jacob said. He felt the artist had found a way to save force by indirection. To keep alive an impulse in danger of being smothered.

— It is like you, Luboš said, thinking aloud.

— No! Jacob replied, more sharply than he intended.

— Yes, it is like you. It is a kind of innocence and a promise…He turned away from Jacob with embarrassment, as if he knew it was impolite to turn a person into a symbol.

Jacob thought he saw Luboš deciding that he was too young and fragile. But he was not as innocent as his wish to follow history to Prague, if that wish was in fact an innocent one. — On the poster the artist calls this his first and last exhibit, as if this were the only moment for it. Until now his innocence was not understandable and after now it will not be possible.

— But no, don’t say that, Luboš answered, in a lower voice. — For I have decided I want to have you in your silly innocence.

Later that afternoon, in Jacob’s apartment, was the only time with Luboš when Jacob felt that nothing was reserved.

* * *

“Have a little faith, won’t you,” Annie said.

“Kafka’s house is over there,” Jacob protested.

“But it’s around the corner from Kafka’s house. It’s this street, I’m sure of it.”

“Who’s meeting us?” Jacob asked.

“Hans,” answered Henry. “Someone I know from work.”

“Bit of a soldier of fortune, isn’t he,” said Thom.

“He does seem to have got around.”

“Is all that true, then?” Thom continued. “About his being in the trenches in Beirut when Mossad attacked, the bodies falling to the right and to the left of him and so forth?”

“Where’s he from?” Jacob asked.

“He’s Danish,” Henry explained. “One of the last great believers. He went to Moscow and the Russians sent him here.”

Annie stopped and raised one hand. “Do you hear anything?”

“Could that be it,” suggested Thom. The large white door of a wedding-cake-like apartment building was propped open by a sign painted with the word JAZZ and a red arrow.