Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Jacob thought about going home. He still had some American change, which he kept in an empty matchbox in his sock drawer, and one night, after he had finished his pancakes and jam, he took the coins out, spread them on the kitchen table, and admired the burnt sienna patina of one of the pennies, which in the candlelight was iridescent with violet and green where people’s touch had salted it. The portrait of Lincoln was ugly and noble, and Jacob took off his glasses to look more closely. On the other side, an erratic line of shrubbery was engraved beside the Lincoln monument’s steps. The idealism seemed to be in Lincoln rather than in the coin’s design, which was homely. It was so homely, in fact, that there was a kind of democratic grandeur to it. It was the most beautiful currency in the world. Jacob was on the verge of tears.

It was money that would be the problem if he returned to America. Since childhood he had wanted to be a writer — to make art out of words — and he didn’t know how to make a living at it. The office job he had left had involved writing. The company had been housed in a brick building, originally a factory, partitioned into narrow corridors and large suites and fitted with teal carpeting and glass doors with chrome handles. The doors had been held shut by discreet magnetic devices in the floor and ceiling, silent in operation, which receptionists could release by pressing buttons under their white linoleum desks. Jacob had been seated in a room at the back of his company’s suite, beside a heavy-breathing photocopier that took up half the room and dried the air so thoroughly that it gave him nosebleeds. He had taken the job in the hope of striking a compromise between art and commerce. He hadn’t been asked to lie in the writing he did there, exactly. Is it corrupt to persuade people to buy what they don’t need? Sometimes Jacob had been able to tell that the people in question were poor. Once he went so far as to lock himself into the suite’s small, exposed-brick men’s room — one of the few rooms in the building that locked with an old-fashioned bolt — in order to talk himself out of quitting. It took an hour. The work came to feel like using the best part of himself falsely. At the time he told his friends that it felt like prostitution. He wouldn’t say that now, probably; still, he was not eager to go back to the job, or to any job like it.

It was easier to stay abroad. Jacob’s workload as a teacher was light, and in the hangover-Communist economy, it was no hardship to live on the salary. He didn’t want anything expensive, such as a car or a television, and even if he had wanted such a thing, there weren’t any in the stores. He would have liked a bicycle, but he could wait. The only thing he really missed was Western toothpaste — he had also missed Western soap until he had figured out that the children’s soap in Czechoslovakia was just as mild — but friends visited Berlin and Vienna often enough to keep him supplied. All he needed to accommodate himself to the idea of staying was a plan for escape. At his request, his parents had mailed him application forms for graduate school in America, and he now filled them out. For an essay, he made up something he didn’t quite believe concerning Melville, whom he did like. Once he sent the applications off, he was able to feel that he had in reserve a way of going back that would put off his dilemma. Armed with that feeling, he was free to stay indefinitely.

Money, then, was accounted for, but it would have been hard to say what, if anything, he meant to do about romance. The possibility of sex was still so new in his life that it seemed plausible he could simply set it aside — not hide his nature from himself but refrain from doing anything about it, much as he was planning to refrain, for as long as he remained abroad, from any serious professional ambition. According to one way that he found of looking at it, he had tried to tell a story about himself and a lover, and it hadn’t ended well, but rather than feel it as a story with an unhappy ending, he preferred to think he had made an error in the telling. He had gone about it the wrong way. He had been naïve, and from now on he would be sophisticated. He wasn’t ever again going to make the mistake of confusing a person with an idea. Ideas were ideas, and people were just people. He now understood that he was in a relationship with Prague, and if he had been hurt, it was Prague that had hurt him. The funny thing was that the hurting made him want to stay. It was a kind of attention that Prague had paid to him. He had to prove he could stand up to it — that he could make a success of whatever materials came into his hands. He was used to thinking of success as taking the form of knowledge, and through Luboš he had been given a difficult piece of knowledge, and the difficulty suggested value, though Jacob wasn’t sure the value would hold up anywhere else in the world. The fear that it might not was another reason to stay, actually. It was as if he held a large sum in a currency that could only be exchanged at a steep discount. Moreover, he couldn’t bear the idea that anything connected to his being gay might cause him to lose his nerve — might cut short his experience. His friends here were straight, and none of them were leaving.

When he returned to work at the language school, he kept to himself for a week or so. His friends seemed to think he was still recuperating, and he let them think so. Many of them were making plans to go home for the holidays.

In mid-December, a mild weekend came, and he looked on his city map to see if there was any green within walking distance of his apartment. He thought he saw the symbols of a park and a pond to the south. He found a brake of pines and birches there; a foot path led in from the road. The day was warm enough for him to unbutton his coat. It was the first melt of the season, and leaves that had frozen green were now relaxing into their deaths, and where the sun had burned off the snow it was beginning to fade the grass beneath. He came out into a meadow beside a car-repair garage. Flimsy-sided trucks were parked in it, and on folding tables there were wire cages of hens and rabbits in dozens of varieties. It was a fair. The people were from the country, and the animals were for sale. There was the dusty smell of straw and the sharp smell of chicken dung. Dachshund puppies in a nest of newspapers let Jacob stroke them, rather equanimically for puppies, and at the foot of the meadow he found a man selling what seemed to be guinea pigs and hamsters. Jacob didn’t recognize the words on the cage labels. Though he had his camera, he felt too timid to take pictures; he wanted to be present and natural more than he wanted documentation. He pointed, and the man put a tiny sparrow-colored hamster into his cupped hands.

— How big will it be? asked Jacob.

The man measured about two inches of air between his thumb and forefinger. It cost only twenty crowns. Jacob returned the animal for a moment, shook the cigarettes out of a pack he was carrying, dropping them loose into a coat pocket, and then coaxed the hamster into the empty box. The box fit into his shirt pocket, and next to his chest it was likely to stay warm.

— I have a new friend, he told after knocking at her door. — He’s rather small, he continued, taking the cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.

The dogs were curious. — Bardo! Aja! reprimanded. — These dogs. She pulled the door close and leaned only her head out. Jacob flipped open the box top and she peered in. — Oh, he’s so itty bitty, she said excitedly.