Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“It’s quite impressive,” Thom said, “an entire pig, especially now, when there are no potatoes in the shops. I recommend you stay on good terms with your landlords.”

“I thought it was just my local store that didn’t have potatoes,” Jacob said.

Henry explained: “The farmers are holding back anything that will keep until January, when the market prices take effect.” Like Kaspar and Rafe, he spoke Czech fluently and learned such things easily.

“Is that so, professor,” Thom said.

“But hops and barley fall under a different law,” Henry continued, “so you needn’t worry about your Staropramen.”

“As if my supply of Staropramen were the limit of my interest in the Czechoslovak economy. I thank you for that.” He took a drink for punctuation.

“Drunken sod,” Michael commented. All the Scots looked up to Henry, and they only allowed so much raillery of him.

“What’s that?” Thom replied. “I thought I heard the sound of a pot addressing a kettle.”

Thom offered around his Sparty, and Jacob took one because he was out of Marlboros. Annie, too, stepped up at the sight of the distribution. Her presence didn’t disrupt the coarse, boyish back-and-forth; she highlighted it, rather, by objecting to the men’s vulgarities with an imperfectly disguised pleasure and by saying, several times, that she expected no better from them. For his part Jacob loved the coarseness, because it meant they did not suspect him; he was one of them, so long as he, too, was insulted freely. He didn’t want them to watch themselves around him; he wanted to belong.

Later, Jacob and Annie found a corner. “Your new friend seems very taken with you,” she began.

“Who’s that?” he asked, startled.

“Kaspar.”

For a moment, he had thought that the details of his visit to T-Club had got out somehow. “Oh, Kaspar. Did you know he taught at the school?”

“Oh yes. He made a comment the other day to the headmistress about my accent. He doesn’t even teach English, mind you. Said I was likely to mislead the students. And Thom’s accent, as well.”

“Oh dear.”

“As if our ways of speaking were inferior. That they are different I don’t deny. But some people would think it an advantage to the students to be exposed to them.”

“He couldn’t have meant it. He seems to have a thing for the underdog.”

“If the underdog is a Harv with running hot water and a full larder. His beady little eyes lit up when Rafe said he knew you from university.”

“We didn’t actually know each other. We more or less have to take each other’s word for it that we were both there.”

“No, you published some poem in the school paper, and Rafe read it.”

“Oh, god.”

“It’s quite sweet, really, that he remembers it.” She took a moment to survey the party as it was taking place around them. “Mind you, I don’t say I dislike Kaspar.”

“You just said he had beady little eyes!”

“Did I? He’s quite kind at times. When one’s out of sorts.”

The air was misty with cigarette smoke, now, and there was a pleasant din — all talk and laughter, because Mel and Rafe had no stereo. “I’m sorry you felt down,” Jacob ventured.

“I daresay you haven’t noticed, and why would you, really, but all the women from the West either brought a man with them or found one immediately they got here. It’s different for the men, of course.”

“That’s such an impersonal way of looking at it.”

“But I think I’m right. Not that I mind enormously, but I had to think it through. Now did you really meet no one last night? I don’t want to hear if it’s too sordid. Because I had a friend in Berlin…” She left the sentence unfinished.

* * *

On Wednesday, late in the afternoon, knocked on Jacob’s door. He had lain down for a nap after work and when he answered was not fully awake. “Shower?” he asked her, offering the use of it with a gesture.

“No, no,” she shook her curls. “You have telephone. Upstairs. Come, come. Father is not home yet.”

As she nervously glanced behind, as if afraid her father might suddenly appear, he followed her up into the Stehlíks’ apartment, with its brown-and-green-patterned wallpaper and its red-and-gold-patterned carpets. Mrs. Stehlíková, in the kitchen, silently out-whistled a long drag on a cigarette when she saw him, then grinned and nodded, blinking like her daughter, in welcome. On the stove behind her were two simmering pots, a stew for her family, she explained, and an even larger one for their two dogs, who greeted Jacob by nosing at his crotch.

“Come, come,” beckoned. In the living room, she handed him the phone’s persimmon-colored receiver and then retreated.

“Hello?” Jacob said into the phone, the base of which, brown with white keys, sat on a tea tray. He perched on the edge of an easy chair of fake green leather.

“Halló? Kubo?”

“Ota?” Jacob asked, though he hadn’t given Ota his number.

— No, replied the speaker, in Czech. — Luboš here. Am I speaking with Jacob?

“Yes, sorry,” Jacob answered, in English. “I didn’t recognize your voice.” He was upset with himself at the misstep. He had thought of Ota because it was Ota who had explained the nickname Kuba to him. Of course he had been hoping for Luboš.

— Please? asked Luboš, not having understood.

— Nothing, nothing, Jacob assured him hurriedly. It was much harder to communicate on the phone than in person, Jacob realized. There was an awkward pause. Jacob’s eyes were caught by two African-style wooden masks on the opposite wall, one smiling, another frowning, like Tragedy and Comedy. He nervously pressed his fingers between adjacent revolutions of the phone cord’s cool spiral.

— Want to meet? Luboš asked, speaking as simply as possible.

— Yes, said Jacob. — When?

— Tomorrow, at eighteen hours. At .

— Underground?

— No. In the street. Under the clock, across from the Automat.

— Yes, Jacob said again, knowing the large, ugly clock that Luboš had in mind. It sat on the roof of a glass building at the foot of Wenceslas Square, where the word DISCO, in a sans-serif font, appeared in the windows of the top floor, one letter per pane.

He and Luboš fell silent again. Having succeeded in their negotiation, it was now a comfortable silence, maybe even a confident one. There was a thrill in arranging a date while in a room that spoke so much of family, even if the family wasn’t his. On the near wall hung a medieval Slavic icon, or a replica of one, a madonna’s face painted in oil and set in a costume and landscape of silver, like one of those old sideshow attractions where a cousin pokes her head through a hole in a signboard so that her face appears over the body of a circus strongman, or under the top hat of a lion tamer cracking a whip, another cousin’s face figuring as the lion.

— I look forward, said Luboš.

— I, too. A great deal. The energy that ordinarily went into complicating or refining one’s speech instead had to be devoted to simplifying it. It wasn’t possible to mislead each other, Jacob decided, when it took so much effort merely to reach across the space between them.

* * *

Jacob left the subway station and walked up Wenceslas Square, away from where Luboš would be waiting, in order to buy a Western newsweekly he liked at one of the few stands that sold it. The sun had not gone down, but it could not be seen. So neutral was the twilight, in fact, that instead of fading from behind the leaden clouds above, it seemed to be settling out of the air one walked through, as if it were a kind of dust. It sharpened the outlines and details of the buildings but dissolved what little color they had into a uniform gray. Jacob couldn’t have said why he was going out of his way. As he had traveled toward , his wish to buy the magazine had grown more and more urgent, until, upon arrival, he had had no choice, even though he was late and the detour would make him later. Only when he had it in hand did he feel armed. He waved it, rolled in a fist, at Luboš when he sighted him. Running across the granite bricks, he wondered if Luboš had seen him. There were so many eyes carved in Prague’s façades, belonging to caryatids, masks, reliefs of politicians, and the figures of ideals, that one was never free of the sense of being observed.