Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

The Stehlíks were dressed for bed. Mr. Stehlík pointed heavily to the television set; Mrs. Stehlíková patted the sofa beside her, to let them know they were welcome to sit down for a few minutes.

“Your America is at war,” Mr. Stehlík said, emphasizing the preposition, which he had just learned from the anchorpeople. In those days, one of the American cable news channels was broadcast free in Eastern Europe, as a gift to the newly liberated.

There was video of antiaircraft cannons starting and shuddering in pink-orange smoke as they fired, and there was video of a city burning at night, from a distance.

“Oh, Jesus,” Carl said. “Well, are we winning? What’s the score?”

Bombardment had only begun an hour or two before.

“They had to,” Jacob said.

“He is a bad man,” agreed.

“But it’s such a show, ” Carl objected.

“It’s always a show,” Jacob answered.

— War is never good, said Mrs. Stehlíková in Czech. She could only have been following the tones of their voices. — It is blood and death.

— Well, that is also the truth, sighed her daughter.

As if to keep themselves aware of the lateness of the hour, the Stehlíks had not turned on any of the lights in their living room. Pale blue discharge from the television spilled erratically onto the faces of the group. Together they watched out two of the news program’s ten-minute cycles, and the war began to make a difference in the feeling of things. It seemed to pick out the Americans in the larger picture that Jacob kept in his mind. It seemed to daub Jacob, Carl, and Rafe each with a spot of bright paint. Somewhat irrationally, Jacob began to feel himself to be less of a guest in the Stehlíks’ living room. The war seemed to prove that the larger world was a setting where America was the principal actor, and therefore, by extension, a setting where Jacob ought to feel at home. The Stehlíks lived inside that world in the same way that Jacob lived inside theirs. A part of him felt ashamed of the grand entitlement that this sense of things implied, but he did not pretend to himself that he didn’t share it. He merely kept silent about it.

When Jacob and Carl returned downstairs, neither was ready to go to sleep, and they paused together in the kitchen. A radiator gurgled and plinked slowly, as the hot water drained out and it cooled down.

“Did you ever register for the draft?” Jacob asked.

“I must have. Don’t you have to, to get financial aid?”

“When I was seventeen, I wrote away to the Quakers for all this literature,” Jacob remembered.

“I don’t think it’ll last that long,” Carl hazarded.

Jacob didn’t want the war to take either of them away from Prague. Some of his high school friends had enlisted, and they were probably in the Middle East now, or on their way there. They were somehow protecting his fragile idleness. He realized that he had lost something of Prague already, since Luboš and since Carl’s arrival. The city had begun to seem less of a mystery; it had begun to put on a mask of familiarity.

They tried to guess whether the war was justified, but they didn’t know enough about it to guess intelligently. They couldn’t read Czech newspapers and couldn’t get any American ones. The kiosks only sold the one British newsmagazine; it was not until several weeks later that it would become possible to buy an American one.

“I hear there’s oil in them there parts,” Carl joked.

“The Marxists will have a field day.”

“You’ve been away. You’d be more skeptical if you’d been listening to them gear up for it.”

The dark and the stillness outside the kitchen held the two of them together; their presence to each other was more powerful than anything they might have claimed to believe. Jacob was taking brief glances at Carl’s beauty, at his slimness and at the pale delicacy of his skin, and it occurred to him that Carl might be growing his beard as a sort of courtesy, so that it would be that much harder for Jacob to fall in love with him again. Carl wouldn’t know that it didn’t have that effect.

* * *

By instinct, the friends all dropped in at Mel and Rafe’s apartment the next evening. They felt not only welcomed but comforted by the sight of Mel and Rafe’s lumpy brown sofa and the linoleum-topped folding table in their kitchen. As it happened, Rafe had been asked to accompany a deputation to Brussels, leaving the next morning, and it was decided that the impromptu gathering should therefore double as a send-off party for him. Thom and Carl were given as many pitchers as they could carry, which they took to a pub in the next street to have filled.

“It steams, in the cold,” Carl reported when he and Thom returned. “Its like carrying soup. It’s like carrying pitchers of life .” He and Thom set the pitchers down in a crowd on the kitchen table. “Sparta, anyone?” Carl offered.

“If there’s no better,” Annie hinted, but Jacob was already accepting one of the Sparty himself. He and Carl had smoked up his Marlboros, and they were economizing.

“You’ve gone native so quickly,” Melinda complimented Carl.

“The embassy is warning Americans not to be too visible.”

Henry nodded. “Terrorist reprisals.” He had read about it in the Czech papers.

“But we’re not Americans,” Melinda insisted. “Certainly Jacob isn’t. And now even Carl is becoming so well camouflaged.”

“What about me?” Rafe demanded.

“ Cela va sans dire. You speak Arabic , darling.”

Bitter, gray smoke unwound in the air between the friends.

“The word on the street,” Henry further informed them, “is that the terrorists won’t do anything in Prague because they’re grateful to the Czechs for having sold them Semtex.”

There was nervous laughter. Melinda set some hard salami on a plate along with a knife to cut it with. The doorbell rang, and Thom said that it was probably Jana.

“Jana is nobody’s fool,” Melinda said admiringly while Thom was fetching her.

“She speaks English rather well, doesn’t she,” Annie concurred.

“And beautiful Czech,” Rafe added.

“What takes you to Brussels?” Henry asked, politely.

“A conference on armaments.”

“Negotiating them down?” Jacob wondered.

“Building them up! The Czechs have never before really had to decide for themselves how much they want. A hundred tanks? Two hundred? What about missiles?”

“Are they allowed to have missiles?”

“Sure! So long as they aren’t nukular . Fighter jets. Armored personnel carriers.”

“Do you like this kind of thing?” Jacob asked.

“Are you kidding? It gives me a big stiffy.”

His confession made them feel that it would be impolite to talk about the war with absolute disapproval in front of him, but luckily none of them were sure that they did disapprove absolutely.

Jana appeared and nodded a greeting to the group. No one had been able to admire her the other night, in the dark of Stalin’s tomb. Now they saw that she had the sort of fine complexion that freckles lightly even in midwinter, and that her hair was almost but not quite long and heavy enough to pull straight the loose curls in it. Thom seemed to hold his breath beside her, as if waiting for his friends to respond to her beauty.

“Pivo?” Rafe asked her. “We were deciding Czechoslovakia’s military policy.”

“In Prague foreigners always decide it,” she answered. “Yes, please, a beer.”

“In fact I only give advice,” Rafe protested.

“Do you write the reports?” Carl asked.