Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They passed a simple round building of white irregular stone. A belfry just as simple, round, and white rose from the center of its roof.

“Are we here because of the radio, by any chance?” Melinda asked. “It’s just that there isn’t that much to see.”

“The radio?”

“You hear the tune on the radio every morning, at least I do.”

“I don’t have a radio,” Jacob said.

“Well, then, you would do, if you did have one. I believe they play it every hour on the hour.”

“No radio,” said Annie thoughtfully. “I quite depend on mine.”

“No radio, no telephone,” Melinda observed. “No mod cons whatsoever in , are there.”

“We have a hamster,” Jacob said.

“Not traditionally considered an amenity.”

“But what is it they play on the radio?” Jacob asked.

“‘Vyšehrad,’ darling. The little harp number.”

“By Smetana.”

“Well yes. It’s quite pretty. You know, the plinking one. Arpeggios.” She gestured instead of trying to sing them.

“Oh, is that what it is?” said Annie.

“A sentimental favorite. And I know that Mr. Putnam has a weakness for sentiment.”

Carl reported that there were more buildings ahead.

“I didn’t say there was nothing here,” Melinda said. “It’s just that most of it was knocked down long ago.”

“It’s the Stalin monument of the fourteenth century,” said Carl.

“Always the bonmoty with this one,” Melinda appreciated.

They came to a sort of plaza of dead grass and frozen winter mud, where they halted. At the far end was a dark, two-spired church and beside it, to the right, a walled yard they knew to be a cemetery. “I believe Smetana himself is in there,” Melinda hazarded. To their left, a squat yellow building was labeled as a museum, but its grille was locked and the lights were off. In the matter of interpretation, they were left to their own devices. Scattered in the fields were a few pieces of statuary, for the most part in the decorative, conservative style of monuments from the First Republic, except for one statue close to them, which appeared strangely modern: three rounded pillars rose from the earth and leaned loosely together. The pillars looked from a distance like concrete but on nearer inspection they proved to be stone.

“We’re asked to believe that these are from the Neolithic,” Melinda said, interpreting a plaque.

Jacob also translated. “It says the three stones were unburied in the first decade of the twentieth century.”

“And buried just two months before that, no doubt,” Melinda joked.

“But what are they?” Annie asked.

“An omphalos, probably,” said Jacob.

“A what, dear?” Melinda asked.

“A bellybutton of the world.”

“I didn’t know it had one.”

“There was one in ancient Greece, I think. To mark the center.”

To mark the place, Jacob continued to himself, where spirit came into the world. A kind of scar. Was this it? he wondered. Was this as close as he would come? He would have come sooner, if he had known about it. He realized his heart was racing, but he was afraid his excitement would seem ridiculous if he tried to explain it to his friends.

“I don’t much care for it,” Annie said. “Druids and such.”

“Why not?” Jacob asked.

“I can’t say exactly. It’s a bit doubtful, though, isn’t it, worshiping trees and rocks.”

“Do we know that’s what they did?”

“We don’t know anything, really, do we. All those years and years, and rocks are all that’s left. It’s depressing.”

Carl and Melinda started off across the fields together, Jacob and Annie following. Ruts and footprints had been frozen into the earth, and as they stepped they could sometimes feel a ridge crumble softly underfoot.

“It’s their Stonehenge and their Westminster Abbey in one, then, what with the cemetery,” Melinda said, “which has all the nation’s poets and the painters.”

“Do you ever wonder what you’ll be some day?” Carl asked. Jacob and Annie could hear him but he wasn’t addressing them.

“Sometimes,” Melinda gently answered. “What a thought.”

“It sounds a little grand,” he apologized.

“But we must all become something.”

“Advise me,” he appealed to her.

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“What about you? What are you going to become?”

She put him off at first, but after a few minutes, she let him ask the lesser question of why she had come to Prague. She had come with Rafe, of course. That didn’t mean she hadn’t thought for herself, but she tried to make light of the thinking she had done, in the joking way that Carl made light of things. She wasn’t quite able to. She said that in going abroad one wanted adventure and one didn’t want it, and that there were costs on both sides. Even this modest confession seemed to embarrass her a little. Jacob sensed that she was reluctant to put into more precise words what her expectations had been, because she didn’t want to be exposed to disappointments that she had so far been able to overlook and which, in so far as she was still able to overlook them, might be thought of as not yet quite existing. It was for men to have careers, in particular American men, she joked, but she didn’t seem to expect her joke to be believed, not least because there was little sign of a career in Carl. One sensed, with both of them, that neither felt that anything had been promised, but that they were waiting, nonetheless, for possibilities that they weren’t yet ready to give up on. They were holding out for recognition, for the hope that the lineaments of what they were looking for would be as familiar and resonant as a person’s.

“And what will I be, do you think?” Carl asked, returning to himself.

“I should think you would do well as a flâneur,” Melinda suggested.

“Excellent,” he answered.

They found that the church was shut indefinitely for repair. The cemetery was, too, though without explanation. They turned back to the lawns they had just crossed and wandered among the statuary for lack of anything else to see. “I think somewhere there’s a path that leads to Libuše’s bath house,” Jacob volunteered, but his suggestion of looking for it found no takers. The statues weren’t originals but concrete replicas, clumsily made. They had been cast in pieces, and the mortar joining them had discolored at a different rate than the concrete, so that a gray princess was bisected at her waist by a yellow zone, sloppy where the mortar had been smeared into crevices. Her left hand, gracefully extended, was heavy at the wrist, in a way that suggested that beauty of line had been sacrificed for stability of concrete — a narrower wrist might have been too likely to snap.

“It’s for stunning carp,” Melinda said, and brought her own wrist down as if administering a blow.

“Oh, it’s Libuše herself,” Jacob said, reading the statue’s caption.

“Who’s she, then?” Annie asked.

A youth with a hammer sat at her feet and was turning his head as if to follow her gaze. “She was to be queen,” Melinda explained, “but the Czechs refused to be ruled by a female, so she chose this peasant as her husband, and made him king.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Annie. “I should think she would have just chopped off their heads or what have you.”

“I suppose she would have done in England,” Melinda said.

“Look at his hair,” Jacob said. “He’s the pretty one in the couple.”

Carl agreed. “She’s a little vague around her…”