Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

It was a puzzle. Perhaps the attendant thought Jacob was too young for a gay bar and was protecting him. Or perhaps he thought Jacob, as a foreigner, might have come to the wrong place. Of course the sight of the two men just admitted, whose aspect was not ambiguous, would have cleared up Jacob’s misapprehensions, if he had been suffering from any. — Please, Jacob said in Czech, approaching the grille again, and gesturing along the path the men had just taken. — There’s room now?

The attendant answered rapidly and angrily, flicking a hand after the two men, as in dismissal. Jacob didn’t understand, and he expected that the man would yell at him in German if he asked him to repeat himself. He watched the attendant walk away, to the far end of the short corridor that was his province, and light a cigarette.

He couldn’t tell whether pressing his case had bettered or worsened it, but the attendant didn’t seem to object to his continuing to wait, so he took out his paperback. His eyes passed hollowly over the words.

At last there were shoes on the stairs again — louder this time, a clatter — and three young Czechs rushed down. The tallest, who had a comically long face and thin, sandy curls, seemed to be telling his companions a joke, which he himself laughed loudest at. he saluted the attendant. There was something arch about the formality with which he spoke the greeting, and Jacob felt at once that he liked the young man. He drifted away from the wall he’d been leaning against, with the intention of slipping in behind the trio as soon as the attendant opened the grille. “Ahoj,” the tall, curly-haired man said to Jacob out of the corner of his mouth — now his voice was feline, and the greeting, sounding very much like the sailor’s hello in English, was a familiar one — to intimate that he had noticed Jacob’s approach.

The attendant had noticed it, too, and because Jacob didn’t want to take advantage of the young men’s entrée unless he was sure of their permission, and because he was put momentarily at a loss by the touch of proposal in the young man’s voice, he hesitated, and the attendant slammed the grille in his face with a clang.

“Hey,” Jacob said in English, startled into his own language.

“Are you American?” the tall young man asked through the grille. He had heavy-lidded, drowsy-looking eyes, but the rest of him seemed to be constantly in motion — turning, stretching, adjusting.

“Yes.”

“Come and talk to us,” he offered.

“I’d like to,” Jacob answered. It seemed superfluous to say that he wasn’t certain of getting in.

The three young men checked their coats, the tall one spinning, as they did, a long commentary that seemed to touch on every detail of the transaction, even down to the numbers on their claim checks (Jacob did know the general sound of numbers; he just couldn’t tell them apart yet), which must have been funny or lucky, because the other men laughed when the tall one called the numbers out, but Jacob could detect nothing in the way of an appeal to the attendant on his behalf, and soon the three turned the corner, out of sight, the tall one acknowledging Jacob’s predicament by no more than a wistful half wave, his hand at waist level behind him.

Jacob paced back and forth, then looked up the stairs that led to the street, deliberating. Unexpectedly, at this moment, the attendant whistled at him, as if he were a horse or a dog, unlocked the grille, and said, in English, “Please.”

He quickly stepped inside. The attendant extended his hand for his coat, smiling with a perfect falsity, and Jacob surrendered it. Sometimes Jacob had a hateful capacity to go along. He paid the two crowns and took his claim check. The attendant had no shyness about meeting his gaze. Jacob wondered what he would have to do later on, to get his coat back.

* * *

The interior reminded Jacob of a small boxing hall that he had once visited in Somerville. In the center was a square for dancing, tiled in a much-scuffed black linoleum, heavier than that covering the rest of the floor, and set off by four thin, white-painted, steel-and-concrete columns, which looked alarmingly functional, as if they held up the basement’s roof. Plastic tables and chairs cluttered the immediate periphery of the dancing area; farther out, on each side, the floor was raised a foot, as if to ensure a view of the dancers, in arcades palisaded by still more steel-and-concrete columns. In the far corner of the right-hand arcade was the DJ’s table. The microphone was so heavily amplified that the DJ’s voice, which the DJ seemed to want to pass off as a bass, extinguished the music when he spoke. The Czechs in the room laughed at some of his patter, but the amplification blurred his consonants and Jacob had no idea what he was saying. The bar proper was tended by a young man about thirty with a pink face, large glasses with lenses too smudged to show his eyes, receding flaxen hair, and a black polyester tie. He sold Jacob a beer with wordless courtesy. The price was no higher than in any downtown bar — just a couple of crowns more than in a neighborhood pub. In this detail, at least, socialism was still intact.

The tall young Czech who had spoken to Jacob outside the grille was sitting at a table near the dancing area, holding forth to his two friends and a few others. He eyed Jacob from time to time as he spoke, without beckoning to him. After a few sips, Jacob threaded his way toward him through the crowd, which gently, unanxiously parted for him, at light touches, in the way of gay crowds around the world. As Jacob approached, he noticed that the young man was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt in a knit cotton finer than any you could purchase on this side of the fallen Iron Curtain, somewhat nicer, in fact, than the paisley shirt he himself was wearing. It surprised him that he had already learned to make such distinctions.

“Hello, sir,” the Czech said in schoolbook English, which, his smile suggested, he knew to be overpolite. Outside, Jacob had judged him to be his own age, but now he saw that he was a few years younger, nervous, about nineteen. “Please take a seat.”

“Thank you.”

“I am Ota. Is short for Otakar. ‘Short for’ is right?”

“Yes,” Jacob assured him. “I’m Jacob.”

“Ah, ‘Jacob.’” To Jacob’s embarrassment, he repeated the name slowly, holding on to the English pronunciation, and then, on a further repetition, exaggerating it, as if to teach himself not to substitute for it the Czech form of the name, which sounded like “ Yah -koop.” The boys on either side, who looked the same age as Ota, followed the interaction with shining eyes.

“The man at the door,” Jacob began.

“Ivan,” a boy in a blue cap supplied. So more than one of them spoke English.

“Ivan? Ivan. Why didn’t he want to let me in?”

The question made Ota merry, and when he translated it for his friends, they laughed too. “But you are from capitalist country,” Ota said. “Surely you understand.”

“Was I supposed to pay him?”

“No, no, do not pay him,” Ota said darkly. He brought his drink, a liqueur on ice, to his face, and his large, deft hand held it there for a moment as one finger slid the red plastic stirrer away from his eyes so that he could safely sip. “Is not in gay bar in America?”

“No,” Jacob said. “At least I don’t think so.”

Ota shifted in his chair and trilled out a quick aside to his friends, who again laughed. “Tell me, Jacob, are you gay?”

“All right, smart ass.”

“Smart ass,” Ota echoed, and then, leaning over to the boy in the blue cap and nodding at him in order to solicit his confirmation, translated the words individually: “Inteligentní prdel.”