Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— How do you say…? Jacob asked.

“ ,” instructed. — It isn’t a mouse, is it.

— No, not a mouse.

“Tak, ,” she repeated. — Boy or girl?

— I don’t know, Jacob answered. — But his name is Václav. You don’t know, by chance, where I can purchase a house for him?

— But I have one, answered. — I will lend it to you.

An hour later, Václav was living in a small glass cage, which Jacob furnished with a couple of empty plastic film canisters and shredded pages of the American political weekly that Daniel sometimes wrote for. Jacob set down water in a shallow porcelain salt dish, which the Stehlíks had left in the apartment but which he was too American ever to use for salt. Václav began to gnaw on a section of carrot as long as he was, cramming full first one cheek and then the other, and Jacob sat by, watching his progress contentedly, one hand resting in the cage so the creature would begin to find his smell familiar.

* * *

Jacob squinted through a window at the dashboard. “It’s a Ford,” said Melinda, after leaning over to open the passenger’s-side door, which was where Jacob expected the driver’s-side door to be. “Your countrymen’s handiwork.” She picked up workbooks, her purse, a roll of toilet paper, and some candy wrappers from the seat beside her and dumped them in back. The car lurched slightly as she did, her foot having slipped off the clutch. “Oh Jesus. Sorry about that.”

“Do I get in here, on the wrong side?”

“The ‘wrong’ side may be putting it rather strongly, don’t you think?” She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around the steering wheel and gave herself a sort of underbite as if she were holding in a wish to tease him further. “I know it isn’t as chic as a Trabant, but at least it isn’t a bloody Škoda.”

“Are they bad? I’ve never been in one.”

“Oh, not so bad, I suppose. But Rafe says the automobile part of the business is inextricable from the tractor part, and we mustn’t invest.”

“I’ll tell my broker.”

“Let’s see, the motor is still running, I believe. No it isn’t, is it.” She restarted the car.

“This is so exciting.” He shivered as the warmth of the vehicle began to reach him through his coat.

“I am glad. I forget that it’s an adventure to go for a drive when you haven’t done for a while.” She looked behind her as they edged out from the curb. “We ought to go for a proper one some day. There must be a castle you haven’t seen yet.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” They drove uphill behind a slow, fat bus, composed of two carriages joined in the middle by accordion-like pleats of black rubber. They watched its rear bob up and down in a leisurely way.

“I believe he’s obliged to change lanes ahead,” Melinda narrated. “Yes.” The car growled as she forced it around the shifting bus. “That’s the bus you’ll take, though you may have to change to a tram.”

Jacob added, “Where’d you get the car, anyway?”

“It’s me mum’s. She says she’d rather it were here than in London, because she saves on the insurance. Of course that’s only what she says. I fancy her real concern is to ensure that I’m bringing an asset of value to the marriage. The nonmarriage. What have you. To give me leverage, you understand. That’s an American word, isn’t it—‘leverage’? At least it feels American. Every daughter comes with a cow, that sort of thing.”

“How’d you get it here?”

“I drove it. Fifteen bloody hours. But if ever I decide to pack it in with , all I need do is drive away. That is pleasant to think of, some days. If Rafe were to take up with that tart who answers the phones at the defense ministry, as he threatens to, for example.”

“Does he really?”

“Yes but no. His taste in women is far too nice. But he likes to pretend that he could be vulgar. Like all men.” A light was changing ahead; she slowed the car by downshifting. “Say, that’s a rather self-flattering thing to have said, isn’t it. About his taste. Giving myself backhanded compliments, now.”

“But if the shoe fits…”

“I don’t know where I am this afternoon.”

“Literally?”

“No, I do know that we turn here. I’m quite good with maps, for a girl. As even Rafe will attest.”

They turned into a lane that ran through an empty block. Perhaps the expanse had been intended for a lawn; there didn’t seem to be any grass on it, however. There was just a thin crust of ice — the kind of dirty shellac that forms when a covering of snow melts by day and refreezes by night — pulling away from orange, sandy soil. At the end of the lane they turned right, into a parking lot in front of a nondescript concrete building from the 1950s.

When Jacob got out, his legs felt heavy and he stomped his feet. The view of the sky was unobstructed on all sides, and the evenly quilted, colorless blanket of cloud above them glowed softly with the light that it was holding back. Melinda didn’t put on her coat until she got out of the car, and even then she didn’t fasten its clasps. Her nonchalance was an ornament to her beauty, and her fingers whitened with cold as she put her purse on the hood — on the “bonnet,” as she called it — and fussed in it to make sure of a document she thought they might need. Admiring her, Jacob felt something like pride in her fine looks. There was no one feature that you would single out; the delicacy was in all of them and in the play and balance between them. The pleasure of having her as his friend went to his head a little. If he had been straight, he might have worried about falling in love.

“It’s always gray here, isn’t it,” he said. “That’s what they don’t tell you.”

“Oh goodness, you sound like Annie.” She held up a folded letter. “I have my original introduction to the institute here. It says nothing about you, of course, but I find that it’s often of service to have a piece of paper of some kind, even if it isn’t strictly speaking pertinent.”

She was passing on to Jacob an English class that she had been teaching privately. The students were research chemists. Without meaning to, she had spontaneously privatized the lessons a month and a half before, by threatening to quit; the chemists had coaxed her to stay by offering to pay her in cash out of their own pockets.

In the lobby the floor was black marble, and there was an abstract brass sculpture, loopy and gobby, which, it occurred to Jacob, may have referred to the different shapes that electrons’ orbits are supposed to have: s, p, d, f . A small, thin man with flat blond hair rose from a banquette to greet them.

“Hello,” the man said, careful to give the English o the color that it didn’t have in Czech. “This is your friend?”

“My replacement, superior in every way. Ivan, Jacob. Jacob, Ivan.”

“We are hearing many good things about you,” Ivan continued. “We are very excited for your lessons.”

“I hope I don’t disappoint you too badly.”

“Pardon?” For a moment the man was at a loss. “Ah, you are joking, I see.” He laughed politely.