Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— Can I? he asked, gesturing to the Stehlíks’ bathroom, which he had never used before.

— Let us hope, answered.

While drying his hands, he noticed the wallpaper inside the bathroom door: line drawings of plump nude nymphs romping lewdly with shepherds. The style of the figures appeared somehow French, but maybe it was just their abandonment.

— Those sketches…, Jacob began, once he was in the kitchen again. He knew the word for “sketch” from museum placards but not the word for “wallpaper.”

— Yes? dared him.

But he was running late, and he excused himself. Fortunately, just as he and Carl were leaving, Honza finally arrived, the hair on one side of his head matted where he had slept on it.

— Václav escaped, Jacob told him.

— The rascal! Honza replied. When he smiled, one saw that his teeth were tobacco yellow and as disorderly as his hair. He assured them he would watch where he stepped. Leaving the apartment unlocked for him, they exited.

The morning sun slanted on the world, which was damp and tender, winter having left and spring not yet arrived. The light sharpened the wire mesh in the fences around the villas’ small lawns and threw into relief the stones in the road’s asphalt. In the field beside the tram stop, darkening grass lay limp and flat.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.

“Taking your picture,” Carl answered, as he released the shutter. “It’s time for me to take everyone’s picture.” Yesterday at lunch, he said, he had taken three of Henry as he sat facing the restaurant’s street window, where the light had been good.

On the tram, they stood and stared with their fellow passengers at the street scenes rolling past, which they recognized but which the daylight was not yet full enough to have rendered common. There was a half consciousness to the silence, a provisional unity among the strangers — a shared respect for duty or at least a shared experience of obligation to it. At Palmovka they stepped out of the stillness into a milling crowd, more fully awake, already chatting and irritable. Carl turned to the subway, Jacob to the uphill tram.

“Jacob!” Annie greeted him, jumping up from her seat as he entered the teacher’s lounge. Melinda and Thom looked up from their workbooks. The oaks outside the window were motionless, and they were bare except for delicate, dark nibs at the joints of the finer branches. The light was steeper now as it passed through them. “It is a delight to see you,” Annie continued. “How are you, then? I have any number of plans for you, I hope you don’t mind.” She pulled him to her in her awkward, birdlike way, patting him lightly on the back to let him know the embrace was over almost as soon as it had begun.

“You’re looking well, mate,” said Melinda in her fake Cockney.

“Seems steady enough on his pins,” Thom commented, as if it were a binge that Jacob had recovered from.

“Ehm, tell me, Jacob, would you fancy going a journey by car?” Annie asked.

“Melinda’s car?”

Melinda herself answered: “Alas, no. Rafe has need of mine to shuttle ministers, and of me as a chauffeur. To an out-of-town castle that his institute has appropriated for retreats, though he won’t say precisely when these retreats are to occur.”

“But you can rent cars now,” Annie said. “It’s one of the new businesses. For the weekend, you see.”

“You don’t have to be Czech?”

“I telephoned, and the likes of us don’t seem to have occurred to them, but when I said that we had long-stay visas, she said well that’s all right then.”

“Where are we going?”

“Krakow? It’s said to be quite beautiful. Your mates didn’t bomb it during World War Two, you see.”

“Okay,” Jacob agreed.

“In three weeks’ time, is my idea. Fancy a crisp?” She turned the mouth of a plastic bag toward him.

“What kind?”

“Prawn. Don’t make a face, Jacob.”

“It’s too early.”

“I know they’re revolting, but they suit me, somehow. They could be more revolting, I suppose. They could be cuttlefish or some such.”

“Prawn is sufficient,” said Thom.

“Did I offer any to you? Perhaps I didn’t hear myself if I did.”

Jacob had to guess how many lessons his class had advanced in his absence. He made his guess and then skimmed through a couple of lessons more, to hedge his bets. As nine o’clock approached, the Czech teachers quietly gathered their papers, and his friends, too, rose. Melinda dawdled so that she could walk upstairs with him.

“What are you doing later?” she asked.

“I’m teaching your chemists.”

“Oh, bugger them. Will you have dinner with me?”

“Sure. Shall I bring Carl?”

“Let it be just us. Pick me up at my boyfriend’s flat?”

“Isn’t it your flat, too?”

“I meant to sound daring. I’m trying that out.”

“Oh, definitely.”

“There’s a new place near us, a project of the Vietnamese consulate, and it’s in my opinion the best restaurant in Prague at the moment. Actual Asian cuisine. Not chopped into bits and fried in soy sauce. There’s a lemon-onion soup, I wish I could remember the name. It’s very simple but rehabilitating. The soup, not the name of it. You can feel coal dust being flushed from your sinuses.”

“Is that pleasant?”

“And there are no caraway seeds whatsoever.”

“I just remembered. My hamster is loose.”

“Is that a thing to say to a nice girl?”

“I mean I have to go home and catch it.”

“Can’t Carl?”

“I haven’t asked him to.”

“Shall I?”

“Will you see him this afternoon?”

“I might do.”

“Then it’s a date.”

* * *

In addition to the British newsmagazine that he bought in Prague, Jacob read magazines forwarded by his mother from America, including a serious one that Daniel wrote for, though not the glossy one where he worked as an editor. (He sometimes caught himself referring to Daniel by his full name. It had been months since he had heard him speak in anything but the public voice of his articles.) He had got into the habit of giving them to the chemists when he was through with them.

He had more issues than usual to slide out to the center of their dark table that afternoon. They scrambled for them deftly and a little savagely, like geese darting their necks at bread crumbs. Ivan watched, over a notepad where he was pretending to review the lesson of two weeks ago, flattening his cowlick patiently; to contend for an issue himself would have been out of keeping with the dignity of his role as liaison between Jacob and the group, and he limited his response to a comment, whose tone was sardonic and semiofficial. Jacob couldn’t follow his meaning, and the elderly Bohumil, observing his puzzlement, explained: “We keep a library of all that you give to us, and we are not to — what is the word — to plunder , I think.”

In Bohumil’s own hands was a cover story that Daniel had written arguing the case for gay marriage, marked with a bright pink triangle. To read, Bohumil had to look down into his thick glasses, and the old man’s eyes momentarily vanished.

Across the table, Zuzana, the young brunette who hid her beauty in a lab coat, nervously studied the table of contents in the magazine she had taken, tilting it toward the well-tailored Pavel beside her, for his reaction, as if unsure whether she had made a good choice. Noticing that Bohumil had begun to read his, she addressed him. — What do you have, Bohumil? she asked, in Czech. — Show.