Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— But Anežka, do not be embarrassed, the mother reproached her.

— How is she named? Jacob tried again.

— .

— And where is she from?

— From Pardubice.

— She’s pretty.

— I thank you, Anežka formally answered.

— And will she learn English?

This was too much to reply to. Jacob worried that he might not be able to rise to the challenge. His hands felt clumsy and overlarge, and he felt oafish chewing and swallowing in front of the children. They shifted in their seats with the caution of birds reassessing a branch that the wind has nudged. The boy had brought out his cable car because it was American and Jacob was American, and the idea of a match in origins had furnished some cover, but the girl had innocently stripped the cover away when, in imitation of her brother, she had brought out her doll, which was merely precious to her. The children almost seemed too delicate to teach.

In the event, of course, as the lesson proceeded, the children’s delicacy was forgotten, like the cable car, which remained on the table but went unregarded. They learned greetings, introductions, and farewells, and thus were able to turn the shock of having met Jacob into a game, reimagining themselves with different names and different ages, and as coming from different parts of the world. The effort of trying to be a symbol to the children and trying not to be one taxed Jacob’s energy, and on the way home, he fell asleep on one bus after another.

* * *

As it rose and fell amid the tiles of the former shower, Annie’s voice, though soft, sometimes touched a note that sang because of the geometry of the room. “The end rings false, I find, anyway,” she was saying, of a novel she had just finished. Her books were due at the British library in the Clementinum, and she was planning another trip there. Standing, because there were no chairs in the smoking room, she had folded her arms so that her elbows rested on her stomach, and one forearm was tucked around her, like a girdle, while the other fell loosely forward, extending the hand that held her cigarette. “Emmeline, the one in love, she would have such feelings — but you ought to read it. I shan’t give away the ending.”

“But you didn’t like it,” said Jacob.

“You haven’t been listening ,” she accused him, and the room trilled brightly. “It’s only the end I dislike. Just a page, really. What leads up to it is quite beautiful. In that savage way, where you describe how devastated people are by each other.”

“Devastated?” Jacob asked.

“So I find, yes. By men, in particular. The cunning way they have of telling you how awfully they intend to behave. She’s quite good on that.”

“ I’m not awful.”

Melinda interposed: “As yet you haven’t had much of a chance to be, or so you’ve given us to understand.” The echoes of her voice, warmer than Annie’s, seemed to set up a chatter like running water.

“You’ll see, if you read it,” Annie insisted.

They fell silent. The presence of their selves seemed reinforced by the room’s acoustics, while the room’s isolation seemed to relieve them of the burden of display.

“Kaspar asked if I would read some pages from his translation,” Melinda said, “and looked so crestfallen when I said I had no German.”

“Did he? He didn’t ask me,” Annie complained. “Of course my German is rubbish.”

“But one wants to be asked.”

“Mmm.”

“Is he still sick?” Jacob inquired.

“I’m afraid so,” Melinda answered.

“It’s quite sad. He lives in such a hole,” Annie reported.

“Have you visited him?” Jacob asked.

“I brought him a few tinned things Tuesday week,” Annie said. “Sardines and beets and such like.”

“Did you visit, too?”

“I did,” admitted Melinda.

“Should I?”

“He sets a great value on your esteem, as do we all of course,” Melinda answered. “But you oughtn’t to feel obliged.”

“Oh no,” Annie agreed.

“He does still call you the writer. ‘How is Jacob the writer?’ So you have that to live up to.”

“Even though I haven’t written anything.”

“He needn’t know that.”

“Henry is still very keen to write,” Annie put in. “He thinks that with the addition of Carl you could have a proper community of writers. With meetings and such. No girls allowed, of course.”

“The cheek,” said Melinda.

“Nobody told me,” Jacob said.

Annie shrugged as she took a drag of her cigarette.

“Would you bring Kaspar something from me, if you go?” Melinda asked. “But he must promise to send back the dish once he’s eaten what’s in it. It’s the last I have.”

Three days later, Jacob found himself in a neighborhood of villas gray with coal dust between Žižkovižkov and Vršovice, just beyond the city’s great cemeteries. He was bearing a creamed chicken casserole from Melinda, still warm, and in his backpack, a can of red currants from his own pantry. At Kaspar’s building, he took out a key that Melinda had lent him and let himself in through a glass front door. It fell shut behind him heavily. “Kaspar?” he said aloud, through echoes, but no one answered. The walls of the corridor were painted lime green below and skim-milk white above. Self-conscious in the building’s silence, he walked past a rising staircase toward a descending one behind and beneath it and then walked down into an unlit basement with an unpainted cement floor. At the end of a row of three garbage cans, he knocked mistrustfully at a gray door that was not marked in any way. There was no answer, except for a faint stirring, as of a sleeper turning under bedclothes. He sensed the presence of a person. One shouldn’t be able to detect such a thing through a shut door, but usually one is able to. After a pause, he knocked again. More silence followed. Perhaps he had the day wrong. Then a small voice said, “Haló?”

Jacob identified himself but the speaker behind the door didn’t seem able to hear him. — Please, the speaker said in Czech. — It is open.

“Kaspar?” Jacob repeated, as he cautiously entered.

Beneath a shelf of detergents in jugs and faded boxes, a man was seated on the edge of an unfolded cot. He had evidently just raised himself; the sheets still held in their slow waves the hollow his body had formed in them. He was leaning on his hands, and he had the haggard, unfocused expression of someone who has been woken from deep sleep in the middle of the day, a look worsened, in his case, by his wandering left eye, over which he seemed for the moment to have lost all control. The mouth was hidden by wild beard, and the skin of the face was so loose that it seemed almost to tremble. He seemed to be smiling, but Jacob couldn’t tell whether it was a smile of recognition or merely of appeasement toward a stranger whose intentions he did not know. — There is no lock, Kaspar continued, still in Czech.

— Do you want still to sleep? Jacob asked.

— No, no. He shook his head with deliberate slowness, as if he felt dizzy and were taking pains not to make himself dizzier. He straightened his sweater, which had been pulled askew while he was unconscious.

As in the hallway outside, the concrete floor was raw. There was a drain in the center of it. Papers littered a card table, which seemed to serve as Kaspar’s desk. Above hung an unshaded bulb, but it had not been turned on. What light there was came instead from the street, through a small square of frosted glass high in the room’s far wall. This window faced east; since it was midafternoon, the light through the window was gentle and bluish. Beneath it, brooms, mops, shovels, and a hoe leaned against the wall. A dustpan and a pink cleaning rag hung on hooks. In a corner stood a steel slop sink, stained with the dried spatter of white paint.