Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— Have yourselves a pretty time, Jacob wished them.

— Definitely, with mocking gravity replied, answering for the group, who then turned away to stare again at Honza’s door.

* * *

Melinda caught Jacob on his way to the teacher’s lounge and pulled him into the unused shower where they smoked. He still felt light-headed from Honza’s moonshine.

“You handle your liquor so well,” she assured him. “You have the makings of a great alcoholic.”

“Except for that incident at the Jazz Club.”

“I’d forgotten. That is a spot on your record, isn’t it.”

Against the rules of the , Melinda had spent the night in Annie’s room. The two women had been yelled at the next morning by one of the house matrons — overnight guests were not allowed unless they had been registered twenty-four hours in advance — but Melinda had seen Annie through the worst of her anguish. In the sober light of morning, Annie felt sheepish about her attack on Jacob. By way of mending fences, she had thought of showing Jacob a new foreign-language bookstore in Wenceslas Square, which had just opened in a glass-front emporium vacated by some dying socialist agency or other. The store had hundreds of brand-new paperbacks in English — the whole thing seemed to have been arranged by a British publisher. She would be there at three that afternoon, if Jacob was willing to meet her.

When Jacob arrived, he found a classic First Republic shop that didn’t seem to have been altered since the 1930s. Three shop assistants in white aprons stood behind the counter, protected from visitors. The counter and the shelves behind the shop assistants were empty; the books lay flat on tables in the center of the store. There weren’t enough to cover the tables completely, but Jacob hadn’t seen so many English-language books for sale since Berlin. Greed made him light-headed. But the prices! In most Prague bookstores, prices were written in black ink on slips of cardboard, tucked into the books like bookmarks. There were no such bookmarks here, for some reason. Instead, when Jacob picked up a paperback Oliver Twist , he found a three-digit number penciled on the inside back cover. So many crowns could buy more than a dozen restaurant dinners — the cost of a single book was almost equivalent to a week of the salary that he had received when he worked full time at the language school. It was the London price, calculated at the official exchange rate with no discount. “You found it, did you,” Annie said upon arrival.

“It’s so expensive,” Jacob complained.

“Is it? Oh, I had been thinking you might like it here, you see.”

“I do like it,” Jacob said. He let himself open a Henry James novel. As he handled it, he sensed the unease of one of the shop assistants, who was watching him. It’s just a paperback, he thought scornfully.

“Gah, they are dear, aren’t they.”

They toured the room separately for a while. Jacob fell into a reverie of imaginary possession; he was visiting the books in his future library; they were prisoners he could not yet free. He settled on Morte d’Arthur . He could afford only the first volume, which cost half his share of a month’s rent, and then only if Annie could spot him two hundred crowns. He promised to repay her tomorrow out of the stash that he kept in his Bible.

“Ehm, we don’t have to talk about the other,” Annie said. “I don’t want to know, really.”

“Nothing happened. I said no.”

“It would be all right if you had said yes, but I wouldn’t want to know is all, you see.”

“Nothing happened.”

“He told me he was going to ask you, as if he and I were best mates, like.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not in love with him. Perhaps I do fancy him but what of it. I’m not in love.”

“Neither am I.”

“If I had thought you were, I shouldn’t have minded. Quite honestly. It was the waste of it that galled me. That, and that it was in poor taste, his telling me. Don’t you think it was?”

“He was going through something,” Jacob answered, feeling some loyalty to Henry, after all.

“I suppose.” She saw that she was still holding the Malory, which Jacob had given her to admire, and she handed it back to him. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you as I did. I do know that.”

“You were upset,” Jacob said.

“I would be miserable if we fell out over it.”

“We’re going to Krakow, aren’t we?”

“Are we? I didn’t like to ask.”

“Of course we are,” Jacob said.

“And Carl, too?”

“He doesn’t know about any of this.”

“Not very perceptive of him.”

“He was ‘pissed,’ as you call it. He only has a couple more weeks here, and he wants to see Krakow.”

Annie’s thoughts turned to the trip. “All of us with broken hearts,” she said, beginning to believe again that they would go. “Or breaking ones. I wouldn’t tell him, if I were you.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Not for my sake, mind you. It’s just that I don’t imagine Henry would wish for Carl to know.”

Jacob agreed.

“It is a flaw in my picture, isn’t it,” she continued, “that the one who broke my heart wanted to go to bed with you.”

“No, because it wouldn’t have meant anything if it had happened.”

“As men always say. But I won’t believe it. That would be worse somehow.”

* * *

The morning of their departure, it was warm enough to open a window, and into the heater-dried air of Jacob’s bedroom fell a column of spring’s breath, wet with melting snow and the rot of last year’s leaf mold. Carl was not yet awake, and Jacob stood for a while at the window. The touch of the breath was ambiguous, like teeth drawn lightly over skin.

Opening his large backpack, long unused, Jacob found three of his short-sleeved shirts, which he had stored there in November because they had collars and could not be worn as undershirts. A mustard paisley, a solid navy blue, and a field of orange-and-pink flowers. They reminded him of versions of himself that he had almost forgotten, less cautious and less retiring versions. He would be able to put them on again so long as he set about it with a measure of irony. He packed them along with a couple of long-sleeved shirts.

In the kitchen, as he drank his tea, he listened to water trickling through pipes to the other side of the house, where Honza and his bride were now established. He could feel but not quite hear the muffled percussion of their footfalls on carpet. Honza’s step was light, but his wife’s was resonant, though she wasn’t a heavy woman. Jacob was quickly getting used to hearing the slap of her slippers on the cement stairs, going to and from the Stehlíks’ shower every other evening. Mr. Stehlík had determined that the plumber and his wife were to share his family’s shower rather than Jacob and Carl’s. no longer borrowed the occasional shower from them either, and Jacob imagined that the scheduling upstairs must have become fairly martial. had promised to look in on Václav while they were away, but Jacob now put down extra food and water in his cage just in case.

“Are you psyched?” Carl asked, after he had showered and dressed. He slumped his backpack on the floor next to the pantry.