Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They greeted each other in Czech. Jacob searched Luboš’s face for a sign of what would happen between them tonight, a hint of what footing they stood on. It was not a soft or a warm face, though it was not unkind. The suggestion in it of toughness excited Jacob. As he looked into the face, he saw by the change in its shading that the mild and even twilight was, even as he watched, at last lapsing, and leaving exposed, as a tide might leave rocks and shells, the sharp and fragmented lights cast by street lamps and shop signs. After they had stared at each other hesitatingly for a few moments, not touching, proposed that they walk down to Café Slavia, which overlooked the Vltava, and Jacob agreed. They walked slowly and with uneven steps, not yet adjusted to each other’s gaits. They soon gave up on French and German. Luboš asked simple questions in Czech, and Jacob acted out words he didn’t know, which Luboš supplied as soon as he could identify them. When Jacob turned the same questions back on Luboš, Luboš then drew on this fresh vocabulary, as in a card game where you may take from another player’s discards. By this means, as they walked, Jacob made the commonplace revelations of a first date: that his parents had divorced when he was a child, that he had only come out a year and a half ago, that he did not have a boyfriend. For all the struggle required to communicate — though whether it was despite the struggle or because of it he could not have said — Jacob found that his own sense of his meanings burned clear and bright in his mind, unshadowed by the misstatements he threw off on his way to them. The misunderstandings were too numerous to stop for; they were only temporary. Luboš, however, was more cautious; when Jacob asked about his parents, for example, he answered only that he did have parents, he was fairly sure, and his smile stopped Jacob from asking more. He had always known he was gay.

Just before they reached the river, they stepped to the right through two sets of glass double doors into Slavia. It was crowded and indifferent to them, but Luboš found a welcome by sharing a word with the cashier in a low and confidential tone. He then led Jacob down the long L of the café, past a fragile-looking upright piano jammed into its elbow, to a table littered with previous visitors’ plates and cups but otherwise abandoned. He had walked to it as if he had known it would be there. Through the wide windows that faced the embankment, they could see the violet, dying sky across the river, too weak now to cast any illumination. The café was lit by brass sconces of a timeless ugliness. The chairs were heavy and upholstered in a pinkish fabric. It was an ugliness that Jacob was beginning to recognize. There wasn’t anything like it in the West. The taste of the 1970s had been here an elaboration of that of the 1950s rather than a rebellion against it — the gaudiness and shapelessness had been made somehow to serve propriety instead of challenging it. Yet the mood of the people in the room seemed to defy the decor, or at least ignore it.

— Your dissidents came here, Luboš said.

“Is it a gay place?” Jacob asked, in English. Too late he wondered if the question might seem disrespectful.

— No, Luboš answered. Jacob tried to take his hand, but he pulled away. — Not here, Kuba. Here is not yet America.

Jacob didn’t take the refusal seriously, and after Luboš ordered a glass of white wine, and Jacob a Becherovka, a liqueur with a medicinal taste, like peppermint tea left to steep too long, he slid a foot forward under the table so that it lay just beside one of Luboš’s. In Boston, Daniel had informed Jacob that muscles were the currency of gay life, and that one worked to have them in order to be attractive to the men one wanted because they had them. Jacob, not having them but wanting Daniel anyway, had thus been a kind of poor relation. In Prague, however, no one seemed to have muscles of the American kind, and Jacob foresaw for himself a field of romantic opportunity that Daniel’s economics had priced out of his reach. He could see no reason for someone like Luboš, who liked him — Daniel, too, had liked him; that hadn’t been the problem — to stickle and resist him. If there was any resistance, he was going to push until he found out the reason for it.

— Kuba, I called you three times, Luboš said.

— Three?

— Perhaps, boys are always calling you.

Jacob took his French-Czech dictionary from his jacket pocket and pointed out the word for message.

Luboš shook his head. — The man, with whom I spoke, wasn’t so polite. He said, that it’s not your phone.

Jacob wanted to say that the Stehlíks had assured him that he was free to use the phone whenever he wanted, but he couldn’t figure out how to say it; his sentence broke down.

— Did you want to see me? Luboš asked. He seemed to be playing on Jacob’s anxiety, which must have been evident in his face.

— Yes, yes. He wanted to say that he liked Luboš, but it required some concentration, because in the transition from English grammar to Czech, the subject and object of the sentence switched places: —You are pleasing to me.

The words sounded childlike.

— And French is not pleasing to you, Jacob continued, changing the subject to one suggested by his dictionary.

Luboš seemed to want to take this up but hesitated. Instead, more in pantomime than in words, he suggested they order a plate of , which Jacob knew to be small, stale slices of bread spread with lard and topped with diced vegetables and meats. It was already too late to find a table open at a proper restaurant, where, still governed by socialist principles, most waiters turned away guests who arrived after the first seating.

It seemed grand to Jacob that he was sitting in a café in Prague with his Czech lover, forgoing dinner for the sake of whatever it was that was between them. He could smoke a few cigarettes to kill his hunger, if the didn’t accomplish that.

“Or we can buy párky later,” Jacob said, in English, thinking out loud. A párek was a fat roasted pink sausage, sold on the streets at all hours.

— And párky are pleasing to you, Kuba?

Jacob was happy to play the straight man. — A great deal, he said.

Upon the arrival of the waiter, Luboš asked him only to refill their drinks.

* * *

Jacob had arrived in Prague with a project. He couldn’t see that he was carrying it; to see that would have required standing a little farther outside himself than he was able to. He would have said it was a mood, if anyone had asked, or maybe a spirit, if he was writing in the privacy of his journal. But he wouldn’t have understood that it took the shape of a story he wanted to live out. It was a common enough project for an earnest, idealistic young person who was comfortable with only one pleasure, reading, and who had graduated from college in the year of the protest in Tiananmen Square, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution, so that his first personal experience of adult freedom — which he knew didn’t count for much in the grand scheme of things but which he felt with great intensity — seemed echoed by the wider world. Although he knew that he was hearing not echoes but emanations from distant sources, he wasn’t above thinking they might have a special resonance for him — that he might be receptive to them in a way others couldn’t be. He had a sense that everything in his life up to that point was prelude, which might safely be skipped by anyone who came late to the story, and the recent date of his discovery that he loved men strengthened this feeling; he thought that nothing finally attached him to the world that had formed him, and that this separation was what he had instead of a skill or a legacy; this was his special advantage. Without knowing it, he was looking for people who were heroic, so he could join them. It had to be without knowing it that he set out on this quest, because he did know that it was too late. Try as he might to acquire a memory of the revolution, he would find only souvenirs. He was on guard, paradoxically, against many of the same sentiments that drew him; nostalgia would be a kind of infidelity to the change whose essence he was trying to come close to. To break through the commemorative trinkets and partygoer’s clichés, it was vital that he learn Czech, from a Czech lover if possible. Even if it was too late to take part in the great change that had happened here, he anxiously hoped that it might not be so far gone that it could not be, in subtle traces it had left behind, witnessed.