Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

At that point they decided to go back to the jazz club in . They all wanted to show it to Carl, especially Annie, who had first discovered it. Jacob steeled himself, but when they went, no one there reminded him of his misadventure. Probably none of the staff even remembered it. Carl crowed over the jazz club, to Annie’s gratification. Not only the lofty rooms and loud, careless audience delighted him but also the music, which he alone among the group was connoisseur enough to appreciate. “They’ve got a New Orleans sound,” he tried to explain to Jacob. “A bigger sound. Do you know anything about jazz?”

“Nothing,” Jacob confessed, shamelessly.

After three or four rounds, Annie would ask one of the men to dance, and if he refused, Melinda and Jana would in solidarity insult him, so that soon a number of the friends would find themselves together on the dance floor. Annie snapped her fingers soundlessly and stepped lightly in the pattern of a square; Melinda swayed from side to side while swiveling her bent arms; Thom always nodded solemnly. Returning to the table, flushed, the dancers were told how good they had looked by whoever had remained behind, usually Carl or Henry. “You ought to have joined us,” Annie would say in reproach.

The only weak link in their chain of pleasure was communication. At the pay phone near their local hospoda , Jacob and Carl could make outgoing calls, but they were rarely able to receive an incoming one. Mr. Stehlík, who would have hung up on their friends, was in Poland with his wife for more than a month, but once their friends began calling regularly, thanks to Carl’s more gregarious nature, decided that it was unthrifty to leave the phone off the hook for the time it took to walk downstairs and find out if they were home. For a while she hollered to them from the top of the stairs, but they never heard her, so she gave that up. Instead she took messages, which were almost always incomplete, because she was too polite to tell callers when she hadn’t understood. “But where ?” Jacob would ask, his patience thinning, and would translate his question into Czech for herself—“Ale kde?”—and then shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. He said something—‘elephant’? Nevím, nevím. To jsem asi . ”

“Elephant?” Jacob would desperately echo, miming a trunk.

“Asi ne,” she would skeptically reply. Maybe not, after all.

The problem preoccupied Jacob. Two lodgers had a stronger claim than one on the Stehlíks’ phone. It seemed almost unjust. If only there were a way for to signal to them and spare herself the stairs. All the windows in the house were doubled, and in the outer frame of the one in Carl’s bedroom, Jacob had noticed a small hole in the lower left corner, which had once admitted a wire of some kind. On the top floor of the Rott hardware store in Malé , downtown, he bought string and a small brass bell. If the bell were set on the edge of the table near Carl’s bed, and Carl’s inner window were left ajar, and a string were threaded from the bell through the hole in Carl’s outer window up the outside of the house to the Stehlíks’ living room directly above, where the end of the string could be held until needed by closing it in their outer window, then would be able to ring for them by opening her window and giving a tug.

— But when Father returns? asked.

— But we aren’t doing anything! Jacob pleaded. — The hole already exists. A tiny little hole!

She acceded. Very imperfectly it worked, though now and then Jacob and Carl failed to hear the bell, which clanked just once each time it was tumbled onto the carpet.

* * *

In Jacob’s favorite class at the language school his worst student was a woman in her thirties named Milena. Her hair, prematurely white, was braided and pinned in a bun, in what looked like a folk style. She had an apologetic manner; whenever she spoke, a smile so narrowed her eyes, which were already hidden behind thick glasses, that Jacob couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him. She reminded him of a bashful professor he had studied with, who had closed his eyes whenever he raised them from his lectern. She never handed in homework assignments. She took copious notes during class but seemed to remember nothing from one week to the next. If he singled her out, to make sure she had understood a point of grammar, she became flustered and indicated by pantomime that he should address someone else. After every class, in what amounted almost to a ritual, two or three students approached his desk to ask (“if you will allow”) about his life in America or his accommodations in Prague. Milena was never among them.

In this she was like his best student, a Vietnamese guest worker named Phuoc, who asked to be called Philip. He knew English better than Czech, as he declared during the class’s first meeting, because he had taught himself English from books as a child in Vietnam. Though his pronunciation was sometimes impenetrable, his vocabulary was immense, and Jacob quickly learned that when he failed to understand Philip, it was sometimes because Philip was using a word that Jacob didn’t know. Among other things, Philip had read Shakespeare, which complicated matters. During the scheduled periods of free conversation, Philip often spoke of his fondness for English and of the difference between his life in Prague and the more austere one he had lived in Vietnam, where his wife remained. But he never approached Jacob after class to say more. Jacob had the impression that Philip refrained because he didn’t want to seem to step out of his place as a guest in the Czechs’ world. Philip never spoke to his fellow students, or they to him, except when the language exercises required it.

Though Philip never overcame his reticence, one day Milena did. — May I in Czech? she asked.

— Can’t you in English? Jacob irritably replied, but then it occurred to him that she might have been about to tell him she was giving up.

“I try,” she agreed. She clasped her hands under her chin as if gathering her thoughts there, and then her head sank over her hands with the effort of concentration. “I have two children,” she said with laborious slowness. “For them I learn English. I try to teach but”—here she appealed to Jacob with open palms and a laugh at herself—“I cannot.” She broke into Czech: —I wanted to ask therefore, if it is possible to arrange private hours? I would pay, of course, whatever you charge.

Now that he knew the mystery of her persistence, Jacob felt ashamed of his impatience. — Lessons for you? he asked, to make sure.

— For my children, rather.

They were nine and six, she said, a boy and a girl. Jacob objected that he had never taught children, but Milena was confident that he would be able to. He named the hourly rate that he earned from the chemists; she hesitated but said she was willing to pay it.