Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“What if I want to think you’re doing it for me?”

She didn’t meet his eyes in the mirror. “It was for you, more or less, that I cleaned my car, seeing as how you are a stranger to me,” she said, after a pause. “Jacob can tell you how it looks ordinarily.”

“Where are we?” Jacob asked.

“On that map we’re on Leninova, but the names have changed around here.”

“Oh, I see.”

“It used to be that from the airport you took Leninova all the way to the Square of the October Revolution, and then turned right onto the Slovak National Uprising. Which had a certain ring to it.”

“Is this the October Revolution up ahead?”

“Yes. And now it’s called Victory Square. See? I suppose it was a victory for someone. I believe the Slovak National Uprising has now become a saint of some kind. That’s the new dispensation.”

“It seems to me you should still be able to turn right on a Slovak national uprising,” Jacob hazarded.

“Not in Prague, darling. Perhaps in Bratislava.”

They took a steep curve that doubled back on itself as it descended and then they began to follow the river.

“Where’s the castle?” Carl asked. “I thought there was supposed to be a castle.”

“We were heading toward it, but it’s behind us now,” Jacob explained. “On the left here, at the top of this hill, is where Stalin’s monument used to be.”

“Is that something they just knocked down?”

“No. It wasn’t finished until after Stalin died, and they knocked it down half a dozen years later. But everyone still remembers it.”

“The memory is a sort of national scar,” Melinda elaborated. “The architect is said to have hanged himself, I believe. There’s to be a party there tomorrow night, by the way, according to Henry. A happening of some kind.”

The steep front of the hill, which had been the statue’s giant pedestal, seemed to be frowning across the river. Their car turned away from it at the entrance, where it could be scaled by terraces and stairways, and they were soon embraced by the solid stone palaces of the Old Town.

“Maybe I should tell you now,” said Jacob. “I’m not out here, the same way.” He felt Carl and Melinda exchange glances.

“I, for example, know,” Melinda volunteered, “but it is one of the secrets I keep from my boyfriend.”

“Aha,” said Carl.

“You really haven’t told him?” Jacob asked.

“You asked me not to.”

“I know, but I didn’t know you would actually do it.”

“We take such matters very seriously, as you see,” Melinda continued, addressing Carl.

“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“It’s transitional,” Jacob added, in his own defense. “How is everyone in Boston?”

“They’re all right. Don’t let me forget, I brought you a program from Meredith’s thing.”

“How’s Louis?”

“His father hospitalized him finally. Against his will.”

“God.”

“Yeah. But he was pretty crazy. There’s a whole story. I had to pretend I was going to meet him. I was the bait. I’ll tell you about it some time.” The context raised by Jacob’s questions and Carl’s answers was too weak to hold them. The threads of it fell on the two of them but then slipped off. The buildings began to absorb Carl’s attention. “This is a really beautiful city, isn’t it.”

“It is.”

“I mean, people say that it is, and you hear about it, but it’s so…”

“Yes?” Melinda asked.

“I don’t know. Monumental.”

She apologized: “In fact we’ve skirted the impressive area.”

“It makes it hard to leave,” Jacob warned. “It attaches you.”

“I can see how that would happen.”

“The claws, as it were.”

* * *

The Stehlíks had furnished Carl’s room with a real bed, large enough for a couple. It was nicer than Jacob’s provision for sleeping, which still involved the nightly disassembly of his sofa, and ta apologized but did not explain. Jacob suspected that the largesse was unintentional — that Mr. Stehlík didn’t want to give Carl a grown-up’s bed any more than he had wanted to give Jacob one, but that it was easier to let Carl sleep in it than to find somewhere else for it to go. The suspicion seemed corroborated by the continued presence in Carl’s room of the two locked wardrobes, which apologized for almost as soon as she met Carl. “I cannot move,” she told him, shaking with silent laughter at her inability.

“No problem,” Carl assured her. “This is great,” he added, surveying the room with appreciation.

“But yes, it is problem, but you are kind.”

“She’s a sweetheart,” Carl said, once he and Jacob were left alone.

Jacob agreed. parents were not on hand, because Mr. Stehlík’s employer had moved him to a post in Warsaw just before Christmas, and he and his wife had driven there a few days earlier, for the first in an indefinite series of long stays. The circumstance had complicated the negotiations for the extra room; Jacob sensed that Mr. Stehlík would have liked to be able to look his new tenant over before admitting him. But Jacob sensed, too, that Mr. Stehlík knew that a large house was safer when it had people in it. “Mr. Jacob, you will be responsible,” he had required of Jacob in yielding.

While Jacob cooked lentil soup and Irish soda bread, his own favorite of the few meals he knew how to prepare, and one of the most elaborate, he and Carl talked. By walking through Jacob’s rooms with his American eyes, Carl desanctified them. He broke their strangeness and their quiet, but Jacob felt content to lose his hours of solitude when he heard Carl tease him for having let melted candlewax ruin the folkloric integrity of the tablecloth, admire the cement wall out their bedroom windows, and confess, as he paused in the kitchen after a shower, wrapped in a towel, that the whoosh of the gas water heater in the bathroom had terrified him. “Are there any numbers, do you know, for the annual deaths in Czechoslovakia from fires caused by water heaters? That thing is dangerous, man.”

“I kind of enjoy it. It wakes me up in the morning.”

“You have short hair already.”

During the exchange, Jacob kept his eyes on the soup. He wanted Carl to feel that he could trust him. But Carl must have noticed the effort; the intimacy was never repeated.

They ate dinner with the hamster’s cage in the center of the table.

“He won’t think he’s going to be an hors d’oeuvre?”

“He was my company until you came. I don’t want to displace him right away.”

“Of course not.” Carl’s hair was still wet from his shower. “Is he eating because we’re eating?”

“I put that carrot in there just now.”

“Oh, I thought maybe it was sympathy eating. But it’s opportunity eating. This is really good by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re so set up here. You’ve got Václav. You’ve got a pantry. You’ve got a fucking pantry, man.”

“I love my pantry.”

“As you should.”

“Our pantry, now.”

“That’s big of you.”

“I’ve developed Depression-era habits,” Jacob boasted. “I always buy at least one extra bag of rice. At least one extra bag of sugar. There are shortages. You’ll see.”

“What are the boxes?”

“Dumpling powder.”

“Dumpling powder. Excellent.”

* * *

In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education. In Rome someone like Jacob wasn’t likely to distinguish sharply between the education he received in sculpture and the pleasure he took in the nudes depicted — in the beauty of the slaves and prostitutes who had modeled for the sculptors centuries before. So in Prague, Jacob wasn’t sure whether he valued the city’s buildings for their forms or merely as an opportunity for a kind of aestheticized history. The buildings interested him mostly as shadows cast by the way the Czechs had seen the world, or had wanted to see it, at different moments.