Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Two weeks from Friday,” Jacob translated.

“Can you and Carl manage it then, do you think?”

“I think so.”

“We’ll have a grand time,” she promised, and as she spoke, she seemed to be looking at the time they were going to have and drawing courage from it.

In the third image, the family were seated around a table. The father’s eyes were closed and his head tilted back, as if he were dozing, and a Masonic eye looked out from the back of his chair, too. Did the eye represent enlightenment of some kind, or was exposure to view part of the ordeal of the son-creature? The mother was worrying a vague white cloth. The creature peered in from the next room, hunched over on all fours, or however many feet it had. Its representation was out of accord with the laws of perspective, too large and too flat — like a figure in a medieval painting that has attracted a disproportionate share of the artist’s attention.

“Do you remember the way the sister brings different kinds of food,” Jacob asked, “and he discovers that he likes moldy cheese and rotting vegetables?”

“It’s a perfectly vile story, in my opinion.”

“I wonder if it stands for homosexuality. It arises in the family, it provokes disgust. He discovers in himself new appetites. The father wants to punish him.”

“Wouldn’t there have to be another beetle or what have you?”

“No. If you find yourself disgusting, sex is a way of cutting yourself off, not of connecting you.”

Annie seemed unconvinced. “I always thought it had something to do with money, myself,” she said. “From the way he talks about his job. He sounds like a beetle even before he realizes he is one, if you know what I mean. Sort of deadlike and industrious.”

“He’s capitalism,” Jacob said.

“Or just, losing hope, rather.”

“If you have no love, that can happen.”

“It isn’t just gays it can happen to.”

In the next picture, the markings on the creature were such that it resembled a flattened globe of the Earth, and it was ringed by its hands, like a crab on its back ringed by its claws. An old woman stood over it holding a square broom. It could also stand for incest, Jacob thought. There was so much of the sister in the story.

“Do you mind if on the way to Krakow we went — I mentioned it to Carl but he said he couldn’t speak for you — I’ve always been curious, you see.”

“What?” Jacob asked.

“If we went to — I’m not good at pronouncing it — Oss-vee—”

“Where?”

“Will you let me speak? I haven’t even said the name of it yet. Oss-vee — well, Auschwitz is the name you would know it by, anyhow. If you don’t want to, I understand, and I can go by myself while you and Carl go elsewhere. I can take the bus or what have you. It’s right there, where we’ll be, practically.”

He found that the suggestion unsettled him, and though Annie moved on to the next image, he stayed where he was, because he had lost his focus and was staring at the image without seeing it. Instead of recognizing the creature, he felt, he was merely resting his eyes on the round pattern in the lithograph where it was supposed to be. A hollow pattern. For the moment the shape was like — what had been the word for the tattoo on Markus’s back? A mandala. He hadn’t thought of Markus in a while.

“Who is this?” Jacob asked, calling Annie back. He pointed to the woman with the broom. “I don’t remember this character.”

“She’s the char, isn’t she? The one who finds him. Such a beastly story.”

“Finds him?”

“I believe he’s dead in this picture.”

Jacob now noticed the family clinging to the sides of the image, framing it.

In the last image, slightly larger than the others, the creature was standing on the roof of a Prague apartment building, now with a head shaped like a squirrel’s and eyes like an owl’s. It had the same innocent hands. Its back was dissolving in a flurry of lines, which must have been intended to represent beating wings.

“Does he fly?” Jacob asked.

“I couldn’t tell you for certain but I don’t believe so,” Annie answered. “It’s too bad Henry is such a priss about his writing group, because I’m quite well read, for someone who’s not a Harv.”

“You are.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” she added, with a little savagery. “I am looking forward to Krakow.” When he failed to take the subject up and instead continued to examine the creature on the roof, she asked, “Does the story really speak to you so much?”

“I don’t know. It is sort of the famous Prague story.”

She shrugged. “But it’s become a little naff, hasn’t it, with all the American backpackers buying T-shirts of him and so on.”

“It’s still a good story.”

“No one in a Kafka story has an inside, is what I don’t like. A story of his is like a silent film instead of a talking one. One complication follows another, and you never return to where you started. And all you want is to go back to the start, because everything has become steadily worse the further into the story you go. It’s cruel, really.”

“But life is like that.”

“It isn’t like that so inexorably. ”

It was strange that Markus had had such a symbol drawn on himself, Jacob thought as they walked back into the bright square. It was like defacing a product so that it couldn’t be returned to the manufacturer.

* * *

Late Monday found Jacob in the northern Prague district where Prokop and Anežka lived. After the bus grumbled away, he heard sparrows bickering in the lindens that lined the children’s street. The new length of the days seemed to have excited the birds, as if it gave them time that they hadn’t planned for and had no idea how to fill except with frenzy. Two fell on the sidewalk almost at his feet, in what looked like combat but of course wasn’t, and then skittered away, skimming just a few inches above the uneven planes of the broken cement.

At the children’s house, the vine that grew along the brick wall was budding new leaves, iridescent chartreuse, which seemed to draw and hold the late-afternoon light. As he waited for Milena to answer the bell, he heard a flutter and noticed almost at eye level a small gray-brown bird with a rust-colored breast. Such quiet colors. It couldn’t be a robin, because its face was red as well as its breast and because it was so small he could have cupped it in one hand. But in America it would have been a robin, and he accepted it on that understanding, which left him a little melancholy.

“Please,” Milena said, beckoning him in, after a brief struggle with the lock.

The courtyard had altered with the season. In their hutch, the rabbits were bolder now, or perhaps merely warmer, and eyed passersby in the hope of food, while sitting lengthwise across the mesh at the front or pacing back and forth with the lope of run-down windup dolls. On the ground beside the hutch, there grew a few green sprouts. Over long raised beds of gray dirt, three lines of white string ran in parallel between stakes.

In the foyer, at the foot of the stairs to the family’s apartment, Jacob sat on the floor to unlace his shoes. He admired a row of seedlings on the floor beside him, arrayed to catch the sun that fell through the door’s sidelights. They had been planted in recycled white plastic cups, of the sort that yogurt and the children’s dessert smetanový krém were sold in. When Milena saw him looking at them, she said, “I must…,” with her nervous smile, and then looked from the seedlings to the garden outside, to convey the idea that they were overdue for transplanting. “Children upstairs,” she assured Jacob. “Neighbors. One neighbor.” She raised an index finger for counting, then hid it behind her other hand as if afraid that such a simple gesture might seem crude. She meant that her children had remained upstairs to entertain a guest. Not long ago the neighbors had asked Milena if their children could participate in the lessons, too. For more than a month now, Jacob had found, upon arrival, a variable supplement of children sitting solemnly around Prokop and Anežka’s dinner table, each clutching a crown or two in a small fist. Sometimes there were half a dozen additional pupils; sometimes, as today, only one. As a consequence of the irregularity, every lesson became an introduction, as self-contained as possible: about numbers, or about moods, or about colors. Jacob tried to come up with ways of turning the lessons into games, whenever possible. The night before the long bus ride, he would search his pantry, shelves, and wardrobe for props. Today, for example, to introduce the word who , he had brought postcard images of celebrities, which he had bought at an Andy Warhol exhibit in Malá Strana. To introduce how much , he planned to ask the children to pretend to sell a few items to one another.