Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“How much!” Prokop said accusingly, pointing at the watch in front of Jacob. Though it felt like play money to Jacob, it was real to the children, who didn’t ordinarily handle it, and it seemed to be exciting them. Jacob wondered if he had made a mistake in introducing it into the game without explaining first that he was going to take it all back at the end. “How much!”

“‘How much is it.’”

“How much is it ,” Prokop repeated.

“It’s a hundred crowns.”

“Wise guy!” Prokop shouted. Everyone laughed. Seeing that he had scored a point, Prokop loudly repeated the exclamation until his mother had to ask him to speak normally.

“It’s a hundred crowns,” Jacob insisted in a level voice.

Prokop eyed his own bill and the bill in his sister’s hand. “How about thirty crowns,” he offered.

“Okay,” Jacob agreed, because he wanted to see what Prokop would do.

Prokop grabbed the bill from his sister and, adding it to his own, threw the two notes at Jacob. “Thank you!” he said demandingly, palm outstretched.

Jacob surrendered the watch, and as soon as he did, there was screaming, because Anežka felt that it was now as much hers as Prokop’s. In their greed the children lost all inhibition, and Milena had to pry the watch from their fingers. As she handed it to Jacob, she said, “Please.”

She spoke sternly to her children in Czech, too quickly for Jacob to follow. Prokop, who seemed to receive the more severe reprimand, scowled and kicked the legs of his chair. Jacob wanted to signal that he was not himself upset. He slipped his watch into a pocket, and to continue the game, he placed the doll before Anežka and the trolley before Prokop, and gave the thirty crowns to Ladislav. There was a touch of danger in the air.

At Jacob’s cue, Ladislav asked, “What is that?” and pointed to Prokop’s trolley. Not family, Ladislav had had to suppress any wish he might have had to join the scuffle for the watch, and he had not been scolded, so the energy in his voice was now higher than that of the siblings. Jacob sensed, in a momentary intuition, that the trolley was a toy that Prokop had never before allowed Ladislav to handle, and that Ladislav foresaw a happy coincidence of the game’s public reward and a private, maybe even secret wish. “What is that?” Ladislav repeated, in the spirit of one who presses a second time the button of an apparatus that is balky about starting.

Prokop touched the trolley with one finger, as if to remind himself of it, and then, as if the touch did remind him, took it up in both hands, bringing it close to his face so he could peer into its dark windows, running the rear wheels against his palm to hear the slow, razzy scratching of the inertial engine inside. “It is a tramway,” he quietly said.

“A tram,” Jacob amended.

“It is a tram,” Prokop said, again quietly. His eyes slowly left the toy to meet those of the boy who threatened to take it from him. The possibility of a confrontation seemed to alarm Ladislav, who glanced at Jacob in the hope of a late revision to the rules of the game, which Jacob could not see a way to engineer without embarrassing Prokop — without interpreting aloud, perhaps wrongly, the change in his demeanor. The rules obliged them all to continue. “How much is it?” Ladislav asked, holding himself perfectly still.

Jacob, too, held his breath. Prokop put the trolley in his lap, under the table and out of sight, and swung his legs back and forth so that his body rocked. “How much?” Prokop repeated, as if he were registering the significance of the question. Then with a quick gesture he popped the trolley back onto the table. “Ten crowns,” he announced.

“Ten crowns?” It seemed to Ladislav too good to be true.

“It’s a bargain,” Jacob said, with relief.

“I’ll take it,” Ladislav hurriedly added.

Prokop did not watch him take it but merely folded his arms and leaned forward over the table. Ladislav forgot the others in his admiration of the cleverly bent tin of the trolley’s steps, benches, and pillars. Prokop waited, aware that Ladislav had twenty crowns left and that Anežka doll remained unbought.

Anežka had seated the doll on the table before her and had brought her own body flush with the edge of the table to support its back, which was curved forward by the pull of its heavy, drooping head. It smiled its consistent smile. Anežka leaned her own head forward to speak some words of advice into its ear.

Prokop cleared his throat and looked meaningfully at the doll.

“What is it?” Ladislav dutifully asked, sensing that justice had to be done.

For the moment Anežka was pleased by Ladislav’s attention. “It is Anežka,” she told him. She was remembering, Jacob realized, the lesson about greetings and introductions.

Ladislav paused, but Prokop, with his eyes, demanded that he continue. “How much is…she?” Ladislav asked.

Oh dear, a slave market, Jacob thought. Anežka was nonplussed.

“How much?”

— But I refuse! Anežka said, in Czech.

“You could set a high price,” Jacob suggested. “You could say a thousand crowns, or ten thousand crowns.”

— But I refuse altogether! she declared, now with a quaver in her voice.

— You have to. It’s the game, Prokop said.

— I don’t have to. I won’t.

“How much!” Prokop said, returning to English. He saw that it was the mere possibility of sale that unnerved his sister. “How much!”

“How about selling a pen instead?” Jacob proposed, drawing attention to his own and placing it, somewhat desperately, before her.

— But I don’t want to! I refuse to!

— But you don’t have to, Jacob assured her, lapsing into Czech himself in order to be sure that the message got through.

— But calm yourself, little Anežka, her mother said, and held the girl’s shoulders. — In fact nothing is being bought and nothing is being sold. But the girl hugged her doll and would not meet their eyes.

“How much!” Prokop said, pointing at the lonely glove in front of Ladislav, who didn’t know whether he should answer. “How much!” Prokop said again, a little more violently, pointing at his lost trolley. “How much!” he asked, still more loudly, of the paper bag of rice in front of Jacob. “How much, how much, how much!” He shook himself, full of a child’s pleasant, dizzy hysteria.

— That suffices, his mother said.

“How much?” he asked once more, rebelliously, of the ten-crown note that he had been left with. He thought he was asking a nonsense question.

— That already suffices, Milena warned.

“That depends on your credit rating,” Jacob answered.

“Wha-a-at?”

“Nothing. Nic, ” Jacob retracted the joke. But having aroused the boy’s curiosity, he had to continue. — Money costs more money, he explained in Czech. — If I give you ten crowns today, then next week you must give me eleven.

“Jo?” Prokop responded, as he took this in. Then, with a show of make-believe anxiety, he pushed his note across the table to Jacob and signaled to Ladislav to do the same with his. Ladislav hurriedly complied. Their fluster was like that of silent-movie characters. It wasn’t clear they understood. It seemed more likely that Jacob’s explanation was interpreted as a sort of ruse — as a polite way of asking for the return of the bills. The lesson was drawing to a close. Jacob also collected the Warhol postcards, which had been left scattered on the table where they had fallen.

Milena retreated briefly to the kitchen and returned with a sheaf of ten- and twenty-crown bills. She counted his fee out onto the table with her habitual fumbling and overcaution, bill by bill. There it was, the accumulation they had been playing with, the disruptive element, purchasing him in the colors of mud and of berries. To Milena, there was nothing shameful in money, but Jacob was afraid that Prokop might cry out “How much!” or that Anežka would find a way to ask why, if he loved them, he had to be paid to visit. Because he had lost control of the children twice, he felt unsure that he deserved his full fee, a particular doubt that resonated with a deeper and more general one, less accessible to his conscious mind. Despite his sense of vulnerability, however, the children didn’t cry out. They felt the reality of the transaction and respected it, retreating into themselves. Anežka petted and consoled . Prokop, still fidgety, beat Ladislav at a game that resembled Rock Paper Scissors. Jacob shoved the cash into his wallet, which the many small bills fattened.