Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— But in America…, Jacob began. He paused. The man’s eyes caught him again. Jacob kept expecting to see a taunt or a challenge in them, but they held only a concern that Jacob should understand that he hadn’t meant to hurt Jacob’s feelings. He believed that the world wanted nothing so much as the muscular power that Jacob could see in the line of his neck as it descended into his work suit. He believed that the world badly wanted him to work in the sun and have a little beer in his belly at midday. He was the base, and he had been obliged to remind Jacob that Jacob was the superstructure. The reminder was inadvertent, not a personal matter. It was only the man’s rough-and-tumble way of being in the world.

He actually doesn’t know, Jacob marveled silently. He doesn’t realize that capitalism will pay those who work with paper more than those who work with their hands.

— When I return to America, they won’t pay me that much again. Me personally. The work was unusually well paid, in my case.

— But still, the man said, relaxing as he sensed that Jacob held nothing against him. He turned to his friends to make sure they were admiring the plenty that he thought was in store for them all.

— Please, the waiter said, as he laid Jacob’s plate on the table.

— A good appetite, the quick-eyed man wished Jacob, and his friends seconded the wish with nods.

With his fork Jacob cut a wedge from one of the dumpling slices and dredged it in the grayish purple cabbage. The food tasted the same as it did everywhere in Prague — the dumplings were as bland and dense as the white of a bagel, the steamed cabbage was both tart and sweet, like a jam or a relish. Jacob ate quickly because he felt embarrassed. He felt as if he were sharing a table with someone who hasn’t heard the news that his girlfriend is going to break up with him. From time to time, as he ate, he smiled at the man, nervously and treacherously.

* * *

“He’s not my cup of tea, really, Kafka,” Annie said, when Jacob met her the following Saturday in Old Town Square, near the horologe. She said Kaff-ka rather than Koff-ka . In the sun they were almost warm.

“He has to be. You’re in Prague.”

“He doesn’t have to be, Jacob. Don’t be so bloody sure of everything.”

“I’m not.”

“I could be more of a Rilke person, for example.”

“Are you?”

“No, but I could be, for all you know.”

“What do you have against Rilke?”

“The same as against Kafka, I suppose. He’s always in a fret.”

“But what if his life was like that?”

“I’m not obliged to read about it.”

“We don’t have to go to the exhibit, you know.”

“Don’t be a prat, Jacob. I said I would go.”

“It’s right in here,” he said. He pointed to one of the yellow layer-cake buildings that Jan Hus faced.

“It’s just that I’m not fond of insects.” As a door thudded shut behind them, they found themselves suddenly alone in a dim, silent foyer. A heavy gray drapery blocked access to the rest of the ground floor, so as to guide visitors up a flight of stairs. The steps were red-and-white marble, mottled like salami.

“There won’t actually be insects,” Jacob said.

“I know,” she said as they ascended. “Only pictures of insects.” Then, softening, she added, “I am half-mad, you do know that, don’t you. I am glad you’re well again. I have missed our outings.”

A small round woman with boxy glasses took from them one crown fifty hellers each and then tore small tears in two chits to represent their payments.

Annie hummed to herself contentedly, hugging her large leather purse tight, as she drifted away from Jacob into the center of the gallery, which they had to themselves. It was not a large room. The walls were yellow and tricked out with baroque molding; a strip at waist height defined a dado, and at intervals, shallow pilasters interrupted the walls, as if to suggest but not insist on alcoves. In most of the pseudo-alcoves, a small lithograph was hanging. In the last one, several copies of the same book lay in a glass case, open to different pages.

“Have you read The Metamorphosis ?” Annie asked.

“A while ago. I guess I’d have to read it in Czech if I wanted to reread it here, since he’s neither British nor American.”

“I told my students about your American library, by the way.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“And why not?”

“It’s all spy novels and presidential biographies and Mark Twain in schoolboy editions.”

“I don’t mind a spy novel now and then, myself,” Annie objected, putting herself, on principle, in the way of Jacob’s dismissal.

“I think they figured that since no Czechs would dare go to a library attached to the American embassy, they might as well stock the sort of thing CIA agents like to read.”

“Is it Agency to read Mark Twain, then?”

“I imagine that CIA agents like to think that it is, when they’re filling out questionnaires about what to put in the embassy library.”

The exhibit they had come to see was of lithographs by a German Praguer, a friend of Kafka’s, who had been commissioned to illustrate the first Czech translation of The Metamorphosis . In the first image, the creature sat in a chair facing a large window that fronted a street. Its back was scaled like a fish’s. It was propped on edge like a turtle, and it was waving many childlike hands. The expression on its face, which seemed to end in a platypus’s bill, was so ambiguous that the creature could have been welcoming the people it saw in the street or threatening them.

“Did I tell you that I told Henry?” Jacob asked.

Annie looked at him with alarm. “You told him?”

“That I’m gay,” he specified.

“Oh, that .” She returned to studying the lithograph. Jacob leaned in again, too. A cluster of human eyes stared out of the valance above the window that the creature was looking through, as if the eyes were a pattern in the fabric. “A bit morbid, isn’t it?” she said. “Paranoid. And how did Henry take it?”

“Oh, he took it well. It was part of my story for this week. In our group, in our poetry corner.”

“You don’t actually write poetry now.”

“No, but I told Carl that you call it that, and he’s started calling it that, too. ‘Henry’s poetry corner.’”

“He would take it well,” Annie said. “He would see the freedom, like. That would be what he sees in it.” She was pleased that Jacob’s report confirmed her estimation of Henry’s liberality, and this pleasure seemed, by adding to her confidence, to aggravate her impatience with the exhibit. Almost dancing, she walked ahead to the next image. “Gah,” she said, squinting at it, twirling with a finger a loose curl of her hair. “It’s a lad thing in the end,” she said, in a half whisper that was both conspiratorial and mocking. “That idea of freedom. Not that he would know what to do with a bloke.”

“I think men do know, usually.”

“Do they?” She looked suddenly at a loss.

“Because they’re men themselves.”

“I’m sure you know more about this sort of thing than I,” she replied, with brittle diffidence. She had lost her confidence again.

“Annie.”

“What?” she challenged and silenced him.

In the second lithograph, the creature hid under a sofa while the sister entered the room with a plate of food. Sewn into the back of a chair was another uncanny eye, singular like the Masonic eye on the back of a dollar bill. In this picture the creature’s face appeared more crustacean. It was such a strange punishment, if that’s what the transformation was.

“I’m thinking of not Friday week but the Friday after that, for Krakow.”