Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Such, anyway, were his plans. He held them in mind anxiously as he climbed the stairs. Children live in a world of their own, and his plans always felt to him like an interruption of it. No matter how willing the children were to cooperate, he felt himself to be driving them out of their natural track and sensed the propriety of their resistance. A part of him would rather have shared in their wildness. In the course of the hour, as they grew fatigued, they would fall back into the comfort and support of the environment that Milena wove around them, which was itself another pattern that he felt himself to be compromising. Because she fed him, he felt the pull of her support much as they did.

As he climbed the stairs, his calves trembled; he was drinking and smoking too much. He heard light footfalls and saw Prokop appear at the head of the stairs and then slouch against a wall, shyly and impatiently. Anežka hid herself behind him and then peeped out to say, “Ahoj!” her voice like a little bell. Prokop pivoted backward as if his body were a roller crushing her against the wall, and she darted away.

Jacob paused to catch his breath. “Ahoj, hello.”

“Hello,” replied Prokop, putting on a plummy British movie-actor’s voice. Below Jacob, Milena laughed doubtfully.

When Jacob reached the dining room, he saw that the guest was Ladislav, a small boy with sunken eyes and black hair. Ladislav was waiting in his seat at the table, unsure of his liberty in a strange house. Jacob greeted him, and the boy acknowledged the greeting with a nod that almost amounted to a bow.

“Please,” Milena said. As ever, she insisted that Jacob place himself at the head of the table. In the middle of the table, Anežka’s doll sat with her back to Prokop’s trolley car. The toys had become a part of their ritual, as was the exchange that next occurred. Jacob asked the children in English how they were, and after they had answered and, at Milena’s prompting, asked him in turn, Milena interrupted. “But you must first to eat,” she said.

“It’s very kind of you, but you don’t have to feed me.”

“But I want. Do you like it, guláš ?”

“Very much.”

She brought him a plate, still steaming, of thick beef stew, which paprika had turned burnt sienna, accompanied by small, whitish-yellow potatoes as clean and polished as bird’s eggs. It was twice as much food as he would have been served in a restaurant. The children waited politely. In the tall, broad windows behind them, the day was dying. A black, ropey mantle was being unrolled and lowered, and it was lit from below, as it descended, by a faint pink wash cast by the sun. If asked about the view, Jacob would have denied that it meant anything, but it’s difficult to take a thing like the sky ironically.

He pushed away his plate and made an effort. He lay the postcards face down in the middle of the table and had the children draw them one at a time, like cards from a deck, and challenge one another with the images. “Who is it?” They recognized Mickey Mouse and Albert Einstein, but Marilyn Monroe was mistaken for Madonna, and the children drew a blank on many of the faces, even when Jacob supplied the names. Jacob had to explain, and the point of the exercise was soon lost in pidgin storytelling.

Sooner than he had planned to, Jacob moved on to his second idea. He took a bag of rice and a single winter glove from his bag.

— You’re still hungry? Prokop said.

“Wise guy,” Jacob replied.

“Wh—, wh—,” Prokop tried to mimic the words.

“Moudrý chlap,” Jacob translated. “‘Wise guy.’” Now they all repeated the phrase.

Jacob set the bag of rice before Prokop and the glove before Ladislav. Then he took off his wristwatch and set it before Anežka. “Jééé,” Prokop exclaimed of the watch, enviously, and Anežka, pleased that it was hers for the moment, wriggled into a kneeling position in her chair.

“What’s that?” Jacob asked Prokop, pointing at the rice.

Prokop didn’t know the word. “How do you say rýže ,” he asked out of the side of his mouth, with pretend furtiveness.

“Reese,” his mother supplied.

“Rice,” Jacob corrected.

“It is a rice,” Prokop answered.

“‘It’s rice,’” Jacob again corrected.

“It’s rice.”

“How much is it?”

“H—, h—.”

“How much?”

“How much,” Prokop succeeded in repeating.

Jacob took a large white-metal coin out of his pocket. “How much is it? Is it five crowns?”

“Is five crowns,” Prokop agreed, as he saw the meaning of the question.

“‘ It’s five crowns.’”

“No, is ten crowns,” Prokop revised.

“‘ It’s ten crowns.’”

“ It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said at last.

“I’ll take it,” Jacob told him, and substituted for the rice a honey-colored ten-crown note, withdrawn from his wallet, from which stared a mustachioed man in an Inverness cape and a polka-dot cravat. A detective or a magician. “Thank you!”

“You are welcome.”

“No, in America, you say, ‘Thank you,’ too.”

— Truly?

“Yes, because I’m giving you money.” Jacob pointed so that the meaning of his words would be clear.

“Thank you!” Prokop said. Then he repeated, as if for the mere pleasure of saying it: “How much!”

“Now you buy Ladislav’s glove. Ask him what it is, first.”

Ladislav stumbled, predictably, in omitting the indefinite article before “glove.” If Jacob had had any foresight, he would not have brought one prop that was a mass noun and one that was a count noun. “ A glove, a watch, rice ,” he interrupted, in an attempt to clarify. “ A doll, a trolley.”

Prokop asked to run through the exchange again, first snatching back the ten-crown note from Ladislav and restoring to him the glove. This time, when Ladislav said, “It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said, “Five crowns!” somewhat belligerently. Ladislav laughed once, startled but amiable.

“Say ‘That’s too high,’” Jacob suggested to Prokop. “‘How about five crowns?’”

“How about,” Prokop repeated. “How much. How about.” With the new phrase he offered Ladislav five crowns for the glove. Ladislav glanced to Jacob for guidance.

“It’s up to you,” Jacob told him. “You can say, ‘Okay, five crowns,’ or ‘No, it’s ten crowns.’”

“No, a glove is ten crowns,” Ladislav decided.

— Then no, Prokop retorted in Czech.

“‘No, thank you,’” instructed Jacob.

“No thank you,” Prokop repeated, with a farcical sullenness.

— Is it my turn? Anežka asked, twisting high in her chair with impatience.

Jacob asked in English about her watch.

“Jak se sto ?” she asked in reply.

“A hundred,” he told her.

“Hun’red crown,” she mumbled shyly.

“‘It’s a hundred crowns,’” Jacob insisted on her saying, and once she repeated the sentence, he rewarded her with a hammy reaction: “A hundred crowns! That’s way too high.”

“No! A hundred crowns!” Prokop interjected, taking his sister’s side.

“How about twenty?” Jacob offered.

— Yes, said in Czech, before Prokop could refuse on her behalf.

“‘Okay,’” Jacob prompted her to say, but she understood him to be agreeing in his own person and handed him the watch. In exchange he gave her a twenty-crown note, on which a blue couple in tweed read a book by the light of the sun and an oversize atom. She fluttered it in a celebratory way, as if she were curtsying and it were a ribbon.