Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Had she forgotten it was a secret? “No, no, it was dull.” He had in fact been looking forward to telling her about Luboš. He had hoped that she would be able to hear the pattern in what, at moments, seemed to him no more than an arbitrary sequence of facts.

“Were you on the prowl last night, Jacob?” Melinda asked. “Do tell.”

“I went to check out a local pub,” Jacob said. “Nothing to report, I’m afraid.”

“Too bad!” Melinda exclaimed, shaking a small fist in a light mockery of frustration.

“Are you a free agent, Jacob, or did you leave someone behind in Massachusetts?” Rafe asked.

Jacob wondered why Rafe had said “someone” but saw no way of finding out. “No one who would have me,” he answered.

“The best sort of freedom, then — vengeful.”

“That’s right. Fuck ’em,” said Jacob, pretending to belong to the party of boys versus girls, and clinked his glass against Rafe’s.

“Such fine sentiments,” Annie observed.

“Come see my cimbalom,” Rafe suggested, now in a parody of refinement, rising up on the balls of his feet and putting his fingertips together.

“Your what?”

Rafe led him into the living room, where, on top of a bureau, there lay a musical instrument. It resembled the insides of a piano, but smaller and with the metal strings crossing into each other from both sides, like the lacing of a shoe. The case was a finely tooled blond wood. Lying idly across the strings were two wool-wrapped mallets, looking like caterpillars on sticks. Rafe picked them up and tapped out a scale. From the pattern of the blows Jacob saw that one would have to memorize the tuning; it wasn’t simple. The sound was gentler than a harp — softer at the onset of a tone — and because it lacked the machinery of keys, it was less regular and more personal than a piano.

“It’s beautiful,” Jacob said. “Where’d you get it?”

There was a buzz. “Oh, the door,” Rafe excused himself.

Jacob took up the mallets and tried to pick out thirds, fifths, octaves. He didn’t even have a radio in his apartment. Sometimes, at night, a tram that he was riding in would set up vibrations in its rails and wires as it scraped slowly around a curve, and he would leave off reading in order to listen. The sound in the tram’s wires resembled that made by drawing a wet finger along the rim of a wine glass.

It was Kaspar who had arrived. He was a short, bearish man with soft chestnut hair and a disorganized beard, and he was wearing a drooping, broad-striped sweater at least a size too large. Between kissing Melinda and shaking Rafe’s hand, he nodded at Jacob from across the room, as if to signal that he should stay where he was. After the silent communication, Jacob was shy about sounding the instrument.

“Are you able to play?” Kaspar asked, once he had made his way to Jacob.

“This is Jacob,” Rafe put in.

“Oh yes, I know,” said Kaspar. “The writer.” His eyes were glossy with delight.

“I haven’t really written anything yet.”

Kaspar turned to Rafe. “You told me he had written a novel.”

“It’ll never be published, though,” Jacob explained, before Rafe could answer.

“That is not what matters,” Kaspar said. His eyes weren’t aligned, Jacob saw; one of them wandered, though each seemed to be studying him from its distinct angle. “It is the spirit of what you are doing.” He seemed on the verge of tears as he spoke, and Jacob sensed that Kaspar was offering an idea that had given him solace.

A Westerner hardly deserved the benefit of it. “I’m an American,” Jacob protested. “There’s no one I can blame for holding me back.” He was reluctant to contradict the man any more sharply; he seemed so fragile.

“It is still the spirit that matters,” Kaspar insisted.

“If I believed that, I might never actually do anything. I might never get around to being the person I thought I was.”

A flicker of mischief came into the East German’s eyes. “Yes, those are the conditions we lived under.”

It was a bribe offered not from an intention to corrupt but from a wish to be pleasant to a new friend. The man’s skin hung loosely at his wrists and under his cheekbones, Jacob saw, as if he had recently lost more weight than he could afford to. He was like a monk who, in a misplaced spirit of penance, was offering to sell short his and his brothers’ labors. “Really, I don’t have your excuse.”

“Is it only an excuse?”

Rafe interrupted: “I feel obliged to warn you, Jacob, that Kaspar was anti-Communist only until the Berlin Wall was breached, and then switched sides.”

Kaspar glanced at Rafe. “I sound so contrary, in your story of me,” he said. “In reality I had no choice. So many horrible people were becoming anti-Communist that day. It was an opportunity for them. They were my — what is the word? In Czech they are called .”

“Weathervanes,” Rafe supplied.

“They were my weathervanes,” Kaspar continued. “If they were willing to betray Communism, there was something in the idea after all.”

“So he’s not going to agree that it’s harder to be a writer under Communism than capitalism,” Jacob said, addressing Rafe.

“No, he’s probably not,” Rafe answered.

“I am not an optimist,” Kaspar said, “except about spirit.”

Jacob was embarrassed for Kaspar. The avowal reminded him of people he knew from school with high but vague ambitions, who after graduation had moved to bad neighborhoods and taken jobs supposedly beneath them, in order not to be reminded of the larger competition they hadn’t wished to enter.

“Are you a writer?” Jacob asked politely.

“Ah, no, only a translator.”

“And a smuggler, eh?” Rafe boasted on Kaspar’s behalf. “Countless Czech manuscripts reached their German publishers through Kaspar.”

“I worked in a hospital,” Kaspar explained, “In such a place it is easier to judge whether a person may be trusted.”

“What do you do now?” Jacob asked.

“Why, I teach with you in the language school.”

“He teaches German,” Rafe said.

Jacob noticed that he still had the cimbalom mallets in his hands. He addressed Rafe: “You were going to say where you got this.”

“The director of the symphony asked me to take it home for a while,” Rafe said.

“The symphony?” Jacob echoed, but Rafe drifted away to answer the door again.

Kaspar intercepted Jacob’s look of puzzlement. “Rafe, for example, is a person often trusted.”

The room was filling up. Thom had arrived with a fellow Scot named Michael and with Henry, a wiry Englishman with wide set eyes and curly hair, who had lived in Prague since before the change. Henry was responsible for bringing the Scots to Prague. He had met them while studying philosophy in Edinburgh, and after arriving in Prague he had sent back word of teaching opportunities. Jacob recognized several other teachers from the school as well, and Annie was emerging, with the tentative, cautious steps of a cat, from the kitchen where they had left her.

“Did Rafe help you with the smuggling?” Jacob asked.

“Oh no. He wasn’t working here then.”

Having fetched a beer, Thom came over. “Have you brought me a ham by any chance, Mr. Putnam?”

“I haven’t seen the thing for a couple of days, actually.”

“Jacob’s landlords hung an entire pig beside his door,” Thom explained to the group. “Trying to send him a message, we think.”

“‘Go home, Yank’?” Michael proposed. He was a big man who wore a black fisherman’s cap to hide his thinning hair and was never serious.