Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“What questions?” Jacob persisted in asking.

“Oh darling, I have no idea. Something to do with tanks, I fancy. Or rockets. I only know as much as he murmurs in his sleep. If he’s asked about it directly, he bores on for hours, so I don’t ask as a rule.”

“Is he a spy?” Carl asked.

“’E’s a bit of a ’andful, this one, in’t he?” Melinda said to Jacob, with a shrug toward Carl.

“Did I just make an ass of myself?” Carl asked.

“Not at all,” she assured him, in her own voice again.

“Tell me later,” Carl said to Jacob. “I mean, tell me if I made an ass of myself.”

“Officially Rafe is no more than a translator,” Melinda offered, “but, being Rafe, he has taken it upon himself to become indispensable to the ministry as a researcher.”

“The ministry?”

“The Ministry of Defense.”

“I hope I get to meet him,” Carl said, diplomatically.

“You will, shortly. He’s very eager to crawl up Stalin’s underbelly, or wherever it is that Henry proposes to take us.”

“If I was out of line—,” Carl began.

“Oh, there are no secrets here, you’ll find. Not with this lot.” Her eyes were guarded as she smiled at him, and Jacob sensed that she was afraid, as before, that she had been too strict.

“We’re very free with one another indeed, you’ll find,” Annie said, with a certain pride. “Very much in one another’s business.”

* * *

When Rafe arrived, they settled their bill, and Henry offered to lead the way to Stalin’s monument. Snow had fallen while they had been drinking, but it was only a dusting, and the men’s boots and the heels of the women’s shoes struck the paving stones sharply through it as they walked. At the monument, they climbed several flights of stairs, lit by glare that escaped from street lamps along the embankment below. Near the top, at a utility door on the western end of a landing, they bought tickets and were admitted. Inside, they stepped onto a small rectangle of linoleum, beside a closet whose door had been left ajar for the sake of the light from the bulb inside. The linoleum measured out as much of the pedestal’s interior as anyone had used until that evening. It was like a stage representation of a room, with two walls cut away, in the corner of a much larger stage that remained unlit. Beyond was loose, uneven dirt; the smell of it thickened the air. Jacob had started to unbutton his coat upon entering, and he rebuttoned it at once, because it was as cold inside as it had been outside, and seemed colder. He could not see the ceiling. In the distance, in the rear of the cavernous space, were the lights and murmur of the party. “Should we?” Jacob asked, once the group had assembled. Henry agreed brusquely, as if impatient even with the possibility that they might lose courage, and stepped out onto the dark earth, which gave back none of the little light that fell on it, except in occasional shining patches, which they began to notice as they made their way and which they tried to point out to one another, where a leak, a spill, or an underground spring had turned the dirt to mud.

Annie took Jacob’s arm. “Do you mind?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

“This would be Henry’s idea of a night out. I don’t suppose there’s a loo.”

“There is not a loo,” said Jana, in the careful English she had begun to speak. She and Thom were just beside them in the dark. “I ask already.”

“It’s boggy here,” Henry called out, from ahead.

“Perhaps we’ve found the loo then,” said Thom.

“Must you?” said Annie.

“It’s none of my doing. Not yet, mind you.”

The light at the entrance fell away behind them, while that of the festivities remained at least as far ahead. In the darkness between, it took all their concentration to keep from stumbling, and they fell silent. One had to put down a foot tentatively, feel the slope of the soil beneath, and test the footing before trusting it with one’s full weight. Because the soft earth muffled footfalls, the only near sounds were one’s own breathing and that of one’s friends and the rustle of their coats. Each of them was alone and yet they were together, Jacob felt, and if the dark had not been so frightening he might have wanted the feeling to last longer.

The lights, which the small crowd nearly obscured, were powered by black cables that ran all the way back to the door they had come in by. Henry and Thom vanished into the crowd to scout for beer.

“Who are they, darling, can you tell?” Melinda asked Rafe.

“Students and artists, it looks like,” he answered. “Czechs; no Westerners.”

“Are we conspicuous?” Jacob asked.

“I like to think I’m always conspicuous,” Rafe said. Standing as they were in shadow, it was hard to know how to understand the note of cheeriness in Rafe’s voice. There was a suggestion of effort in it, as if he were trying to set a tone. What light there was caught only in his loose hair, and his face remained dark. “Do you need a job?” he asked Carl abruptly.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“It’s very generous of you—”

“I haven’t offered yet.”

Carl chuckled politely. “I may look around, but I’m only planning to stay a few months.”

“That’s clever of you. I don’t know why none of us thought of that.”

“Never say never, I suppose,” Carl answered, trying to match Rafe’s casual manner, but not quite managing to. The darkness and the sense of being sequestered underground seemed to have brought the group into an unintended intimacy. They felt themselves being studied by one another, even though it was impossible to see where a person’s eyes were looking.

“There’s plenty for everyone,” Thom declared, as he and Henry returned with a round, in bottles.

“Would you like more work?” Rafe asked Jacob privately, after they had all toasted one another. It was another private English class, he explained, in this case a group of college students who edited a political weekly. They had been the first to print a certain rumor during the revolution. “It wasn’t true, of course, but it was very bold of them all the same.”

“Why did they print it if it wasn’t true?”

“They thought it was. Somebody was spreading disinformation. Somebody inside the StB, apparently. Nobody can quite figure out the motive.”

“And these students spread it further.”

“Quite innocently,” Rafe smiled. “The boys, we call them. Melinda has taught them, too, but neither of us has the time, anymore.”

“Thank you.” If it paid as well as the chemists’, Jacob would be able to drop down to half-time at the language school.

“Nonsense. Thank you , for taking them off my hands.” He took a swig from his beer in his loose-armed, careless way. There was an awkward pause between them, on account of having transacted business. Melinda had gone off with Jana, who had learned there was a restroom after all. “Quite a setting,” Rafe commented. “The real Czech underground, as it were.”

Jacob let his attention wander into the surrounding crowd. The partygoers had stationed their supply of beer in a corner of the monument — there were two words for “corner” in Czech, Jacob had recently learned; it was usually roh when understood from the outside, and usually kout from the inside, though not always — and their talk was echoed by the two perpendicular concrete walls nearby so sharply and quickly that it was beyond Jacob’s skill in Czech to follow any of it. Even if he had been able to see distinctly, he didn’t think he would have been able to parse the meaning of clothes and expressions as well as he could in T-Club. The partygoers were straight, after all. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, that was a false assumption. They were young; they were his age, mostly. They were excited, with the selfish happiness of people who have pulled off a stunt together, and that energy would be a kind of ring around them, he knew, that would lock him out, at first, if he tried to test it, but if he were able to break into it somehow, if he were able to think of something to say that took their interest, the party might become a place where he could meet someone, perhaps someone who was gay but for whom gayness wasn’t the beginning and end of himself, who had first suspected it of himself, as Jacob had, not so long ago, who thought of himself mostly just as someone attracted to people who were playful, inventive, and gentle.