Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“I didn’t mean—,” Jacob began.

Hans smiled falsely. “It is understandable that an American should have trouble with, how should I say it, the idea of ideals. In your country they are hardly a force in public affairs.”

“Oh no, they are,” Jacob said.

“Then you shall tell me the name of the ideal that inspired your country to overthrow Allende, who was democratically elected, and to replace him with Pinochet, a torturer and a murderer. Do you know to what I am referring?”

“Yes, Chile,” Jacob was able to answer, but only because he had once read a novel about the coup. He felt a chill in his stomach and drank more of the sekt, to calm himself. “But it happened without our knowledge.”

“Ah, the American people and their knowledge. Indeed, they were so upset that a few years later their government gave money to death squads in El Salvador, and your military supervised torture in El Salvador’s prisons.”

Was this true? It seemed suspicious to Jacob that he had never heard the question argued before in this way, as if America were culpable rather than inadvertently complicit. He reproached himself for never having cared to find out the facts. It was surprising how tender he was about his country’s honor; he had always thought of himself as merely a critic, but his mouth was now dry with apprehensiveness. “Many Americans voted against Reagan because of El Salvador,” he said, somewhat tentatively.

The Dane sighed. From the heat of conflict, Hans’s face was lightly flushed, and in its corners, where prickly white sideburns gave way to finer curls, Jacob saw that he might have found Hans desirable, under other circumstances. Seeing that Jacob had finished his glass, Hans poured him another. It occurred to Jacob that this wasn’t the first refill, or even the second. “And Nicaragua?” Hans continued. “Are you going to defend your country’s actions in Nicaragua as well?” Hans’s manner was a little bit that of an older brother.

“I’m not defending any of it,” Jacob said. It was as a critic that he should answer Hans, he saw. “I’m saying that America does have ideals, and Iran-Contra is a perfect example, because when it was exposed, it was a national scandal. There were hearings in Congress. It was on the front page of every newspaper.”

“But Oliver North is not in jail,” Hans answered, with a quickness that suggested he had met the argument before, “and Mr. Bush, when he visited several weeks ago, to accept tribute from the so-called liberated Czechoslovakia, seemed still to be your president.”

“He isn’t my president.”

“Oh yes, he is.”

“You say that as if I had voted for him. You don’t know anything about me.”

“It is true, I don’t.”

The table fell silent. “I don’t want any more sekt,” Jacob declared, rising to his feet. The periphery of his vision darkened for a moment as he stood, and he had to wait for the blood to return to his head. “I’m going to get something else to drink,” he told his friends, meaning something nonalcoholic, and walked off toward the bar in the other room.

His thinking mind, as he walked, repeated the stages of the argument and struggled to improve his position, looking for new defenses and new points of attack — America’s benevolence to Western Europe and the Third World, the death in Stalin’s Russia of millions by starvation and gulag. But his deeper mind had fallen still. His eyes seemed not to see the faces he passed but to take impressions, the way children lay a blank white sheet of paper over an old headstone and raise its contours with a bar of charcoal. The still images his eyes took were not charcoal gray, however; they were gold, as if the boldness of the drums and horns was tinting what he saw. He was a stranger here. He wasn’t known to any of these people. A girl with a bandanna tied across her forehead as a headdress glanced down bashfully under his stare, and then up again to see if he was still looking. All these people were so happy in not knowing him.

He asked the bartender for a glass of tonic water, but the bartender merely looked at him. Jacob repeated himself, more loudly, but the man backed away and turned to another customer. Jacob started to accuse him of ill treatment but then realized that he’d been speaking in English. Of course the man hadn’t understood.

In Czech he succeeded in purchasing the tonic. He turned to face the band as he sipped it. He seemed to be standing at the best vantage point for seeing and hearing — at the focus of the room. The faces of the musicians shone with sweat; their shirts were damp on the chests and under the arms. The metal of their instruments seemed to concentrate the room’s light, the gold, angry light that seemed to have more substance and presence than Jacob himself did. Their music was a kind of sorrowful shouting. It was American and not American, white and black. But it made no connection between these worlds, Jacob decided. He had drunk in Hans’s bitterness; his thoughts were saturated with it. The powerless tried to reach across with their art, he reasoned, but it was in the failure of the attempt that the powerful found their pleasure, which the powerless misunderstood as sympathy. The better the art, the more poignant the failure. The only one who really suffered under the illusion was the artist.

Jacob took one more sip of his sour tonic, and threw up — a sudden and horribly comic expulsion. For a moment, he leaned over the vomit on the floor in front of him, as if he were going to try to wipe it up with the handkerchief he always carried in his back pocket. But to his relief he had to acknowledge that there was too much of it. (What had he been eating? he of course wondered.) He was going to have to let someone else clean up his mess. He ran to the men’s room and locked himself in a stall.

There he felt abruptly clear-headed. He sat on the closed toilet seat and stared at the metal panels around him. The gold that had been coating his sight had subsided; now the air seemed dusty blue. He tried to reassure himself with the thought that throwing up was a silly and trivial offense. Young people often did it after drinking too much. He hadn’t thought that he ever would, but evidently it had been his turn to. That’s all it was.

“Jacob?” Thom called, after about a quarter of an hour. “Are you in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I needn’t tell anyone, if you don’t like.”

“You might as well. I’m going to stay in here forever.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

“I threw up in front of everyone. In the middle of the other room.”

“Was that you, then? You had a cross-eyed look when you left the table.”

“I’m going to wait here until everyone else in the club has gone home.”

Thom was too considerate to laugh. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh, much better now.”

“I always feel much improved after a good retch, myself. Nasty stuff, that sekt. Should have warned you about it.”

“It shouldn’t be mixed with politics,” Jacob said, speaking through his hands.

“That Hans is rather full of himself, isn’t he. I know he’s Henry’s friend, but I didn’t appreciate his tone.”

“Oh, he’s all right. He just wanted a debate.”

“I thought he became a bit personal.”

“Only because I took it that way.”

A couple of strangers came into the men’s room. Jacob waited silently inside his stall, and Thom waited silently outside it, until they left.

“How shall we proceed, then?” Thom asked.

“The Czechs will yell at me if they see me.”

“I expect they’ve already forgotten about it, but we could keep them from seeing you, if you like.”

“Could you get my coat and hat? I can’t go back in there.”