Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— And you show, too, he replied. He stood his magazine up, face out, for her inspection, and she flopped shut the cover of hers and leaned it toward him, for his.

“That is the sign, I think, of the guise,” she said in English, looking to Jacob for confirmation.

Jacob didn’t want to seem to understand too quickly. “The gays,” he corrected, after a moment.

There was an echo as several chemists practiced the pronunciation.

“They are going to marry,” Bohumil said, relishing the topic with the impunity of his age.

“To marry,” Zuzana repeated, slowly smiling at Bohumil’s freedom as she understood. “That is interesting.”

“They’re going to talk about it, anyway,” Jacob said. “It’s not a done deal.”

They made him write “done deal” on the chalkboard. “Fait accompli,” said Bohumil’s wife, Zdenka, half to herself, as she figured it out, almost warbling the words on account of their French origin.

“But they can marry now,” Ivan said, “if a gay marries a lesbian.” He looked to Jacob for praise, and Jacob tried to smile. There were murmurs as the other chemists established among themselves that the word “lesbian” meant what it evidently did. Ivan’s head was large, the way a child’s was, Jacob noticed, and trembled slightly as if with the effort of being held up. Jacob was glad that no one had laughed but slightly embarrassed for Ivan’s sake.

“It is curious,” Bohumil resumed, “that they want to marry. They will lose freedom.”

“This depends,” his wife answered, addressing the group rather than her husband, “on this, how is the marriage.”

“Touché,” said Jacob.

“Ah, as in…,” said Bohumil, and he waved an imaginary sword. Zdenka wildly waved one, too, to second his understanding.

“Tell me,” Zuzana queried Jacob, “will the people vote the question?”

“Surely,” Pavel broke in, his brows knitted, “it is to the Assembly.”

“But pardon me, there are two houses in the American parliament, that yes?” Ivan asked.

“It’s confusing,” Jacob said. He drew a diagram on the blackboard to explain that the proper word was “Congress,” and that it could be used to refer either to the House of Representatives alone, or to both the House and the Senate.

“It is to the Congress,” Bohumil said, pointing at Jacob’s nested circles, “if it is a matter of law. But it is to the Court, I think, if it is a matter of justice. This writer,” he continued, meaning Daniel, as his eyes vanished again into the refraction of his lenses, “wishes it a matter of law, though I do not understand why.”

“Conservatives always prefer for Congress to decide,” Jacob offered, as a hint to the mystery, “and Daniel is a sort of conservative.”

“He is for gay marriage?” Bohumil said doubtfully. “Yet he is conservative?”

“Daniel’s like that,” Jacob said, retreating into the colloquial, to hide from anyone who didn’t want to understand.

“You call him Daniel,” Zuzana observed.

“I knew him in America.”

There was a delicate pause. “It is very interesting,” Bohumil supplied, to cover it, and leaning back in his chair he quietly summarized the issues in Czech for his wife’s benefit, his neighbors leaning in to overhear his explanation and nodding as they took it in.

Ivan raised his hand, and Jacob quickly granted him the permission that no one else in the room felt the need to ask for. “You in America,” Ivan said, “have two parliaments, and we in Czechoslovakia have two presidents.” Again Jacob failed to understand that Ivan was joking until after he had finished speaking, Ivan’s eyes were so skittish, and he kept the pitch of his voice so deliberately low.

“No one I’ve met seems to like Klaus,” Jacob hazarded.

The chemists seemed unsure how to respond. “He is doing what is perhaps necessary,” Ivan cautiously began, in his semiofficial capacity.

“As he says,” Zuzana interrupted.

“But it is difficult for us, in the results,” Ivan continued. “The prices increase, but the wages do not.”

“We are nervous,” Zuzana said, with a shrug.

Jacob nodded. He recalled that had described her father with the same adjective, and he wondered if he had missed a nuance. “ Nervozní, ” Jacob asked, using the Czech word, “what does it mean exactly?”

“ Nervozní ? It is to be—,” Zuzana started to explain, and then tightened her body in demonstration.

“Is it like being angry?” Jacob persisted.

“No,” Zuzana answered, shaking her head. “It is to respond too, too…” She circled her hands around each other, as if winding a skein.

“Perhaps sometimes it can include anger,” Bohumil said, speculatively.

“It sounds like it’s like it is in English,” Jacob said. “I don’t know why I thought it might be different.”

“All was here the same for so long,” said Bohumil, “that we are not accustomed to the use of so many of our nerves, and perhaps the new use makes some of us angry.”

“We are afraid, perhaps,” said Ivan, smiling in hopes of matching Bohumil in wit, “because the Communists were saying, for many years, that under capitalism, the poor are living in the streets. They were telling us, that the poor are asking for money, to buy food. What is the word for it, please?”

“Begging,” Jacob said.

“They were telling us that the poor are begging in the American cities,” Ivan continued, his boyish frame quivering with half-suppressed amusement.

“It was a propaganda,” Zuzana agreed. She shook her head to assure Jacob that she hadn’t believed it any more than Ivan had.

Jacob was at a loss. Pavel clasped his hands in his lap and then glanced up. A moment passed. “But in fact it is true, I think,” said Pavel.

— But no, Zuzana reproved him in Czech, under the impression that he was teasing. — Why do you say that? Murmuring washed over the room, as the slower students asked to be caught up.

— I saw it, Pavel replied.

Zuzana realized he was serious. — When?

— In eighty-seven. In Chicago. They open the doors, and you are to give them coins. They carry sacks of their things with them, all together. All dirty.

“Surely not,” Ivan said, in English, contradicting Pavel but looking steadily at Jacob.

“The term people use is ‘the homeless,’” Jacob said, returning Ivan’s gaze and then glancing away. He chalked the word on the blackboard behind him. He felt a strange pleasure in disillusioning Ivan.

A blankness fell over Zuzana’s features.

“The homeless,” Bohumil echoed, and then added, absentmindedly, “Where is my home?” the translated title of a Czech folk song, as if his interest went no further than the vocabulary word. He continued to flip through the magazine in his hands, signaling by the continued movement his lack of surprise at the revelation. “It is too bad,” he said mildly.

Ivan kept his eyes fixed on Jacob, as if he could not now afford to let his attachment to Jacob, and to America through him, seem to falter, even momentarily. “I did not know this,” he admitted.

* * *

After class Ivan cornered Jacob. “May I walk with you? You take the bus number one hundred forty-four, I think.”

“I’m headed that way.”

“Headed that way,” Ivan repeated, self-pedagogically. As Jacob squared his books, his papers, and the school tape recorder inside his backpack, he felt the eyes of the other chemists noticing Ivan as they said good-bye. Jacob returned their good-byes bravely, as if no secret were implied by Ivan’s lingering, but he, too, suspected that a secret was forthcoming. As he walked down the institute’s corridor with Ivan, he became unpleasantly aware of the care with which Ivan matched the pace of his steps.