Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

The students began hollering. A man in a peasant’s blouse and a peculiarly shapeless leather hat began to blow a slender antique clarion. No one paid attention to his call, nor did they heed the gestures of a young blond in a black robe and a cardboard miter who with mock solemnity and hauteur began to bless and to direct the crowd. The three bees grabbed hands and began to skip in a line. Other lines soon formed and began to cross through the crowd, zigging and zagging. Soon, too, there were circles, dancing around a piper or just to their own unself-conscious singing.

It was as if the friends had stumbled into a party that they hadn’t been invited to.

A young man with deep-sunk eyes, his plaid flannel shirt half-unbuttoned, wildly drunk and in no disguise, began to march, fury and drunkenness cooperating in him to create a stately pace. He bellowed fiercely as he proceeded, punching first one fist into the air and then the other, sometimes both. At first, as with the trumpeter and the bishop, no one seemed to pay attention, but the rhythm of his steps, because slower, was decisive, and the bees began to trail him, shufflingly. Others in turn unseriously fell in with them. Half a dozen revelers climbed into a jeep, which had been parked on the square in anticipation, and starting its engine, they nosed it into the procession, too. On the back of the jeep was mounted a long white banner that looked at first glance like that of the workers’ movement Solidarity, but instead of the word “ ,” the students had painted in the same iconic, bright red hand-lettering. Yet there was no trace of humor in the eyes of the young man at the head of the parade. His eyes didn’t even focus. He had merely the all-hailing, impersonal belligerence of a drunk who needs to get into a fight. He trained his menace steadily outward, ahead of him, clearing a path.

He led the procession toward the north entrance of the great market hall. No clear distinction separated the parade from the crowd admiring it. One drew from the other — drew the other into it. So the friends, too, followed the leader of the parade.

“We’re going inside,” Jacob said as they approached the hall. It delighted him.

“Should we?” Annie asked.

As they passed under the arch of the doorway, the chants of the students began to gather and echo in the round vaults of the ceiling and the alcoves along the hall’s long gallery. Having left the sunlight, they were blind for a few moments, and had for sensation only the echoes and the feel of staggering and jostling. As their eyes adjusted, the hall itself appeared: the ceilings painted with the emblems and heraldic crests of the city; gilt chandeliers, whose shape uncannily but not quite identifiably suggested an animal growth of bone or horn; and, obscured by the marchers themselves, the stalls of vendors, whose cheap goods, the usual off-brand Western cosmetics, English-language workbooks printed in China, and flimsy leather belts and purses, had disappointed the friends on a visit two days prior. They were harrowing the temple, Jacob thought. Was the word “harrowing” or “hallowing”? He couldn’t remember. He turned to check on his friends and saw that Annie was slouching defensively.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Brilliant, thanks.”

The light, as they emerged by the southern doors, washed out the sky, and the roar of the crowd, escaping the hall’s confines, changed pitch, the way the roar in a whelk’s shell rises and clarifies as you turn it away from your ear.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Would you please not ask me that so often?”

Carl trotted ahead so as to have a shot of the parade as it exited the market hall. Inside there hadn’t been enough light to take pictures, but in the closeness he had caught some of the crowd’s enthusiasm.

The parade left the great square by a southern street. Jacob and Annie trailed it on the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Jacob said to Annie, when Carl had abandoned the two of them on one of his documentary missions.

“Yesterday?”

The parade had thinned as it stretched along the street, and in slow cycles it shouted to and was hailed by an audience lining the street.

“I wasn’t ready to see it, but—”

“Gah, no,” she cut him off. “It isn’t that.”

“You are angry, then.”

She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Don’t encourage him,” she said, after a pause. “Don’t encourage him to break her heart.”

He heard for a moment the coarseness of the cheering around them. “But if it’s what they both want,” Jacob tried to answer.

“He doesn’t want it for her.”

“If he can’t stay, he can’t stay.”

“That’s no reason.” Briefly she challenged him with her gaze but then looked away.

The parade turned west, toward the river. It passed one of the seminaries, where a couple of young men with unwashed hair were leaning out of adjacent windows in an upper story to watch. — Come down! a parader shouted, in Polish words that resembled Czech closely enough for Jacob to understand. Others echoed the call, and soon the crowd was roaring: —Come down! Come with us! The two men in the window glanced at each other with guilty happiness. One retreated, but the other waved back to the crowd sheepishly, amicably. Jacob nudged Carl, but when Carl raised his camera, the remaining boy, too, ducked, and there were only the empty windows and a flapping white shade.

* * *

“We thought perhaps Thursday night,” Melinda let Jacob know, when he saw her in the teacher’s lounge upon their return. “In a place with the absurd name of the Love Bar, which Rafe reports is quite sympatický . Just south of the Charles Bridge, on the embankment itself. On the water, really.”

“Which side?”

“This side. Our side.”

Jacob liked being back even more than he had liked being away. He liked living in a world where the occasion didn’t have to be named. He liked the sense of order according to which it fell to Mel and Rafe to make such appointments.

This world and this order Carl was due to leave in a week and a half, a few days after the new month. Henry was going to host him for those last few days, so Carl wouldn’t have to spend a whole month’s rent on them. had confirmed that her family was willing to take back Carl’s room on the first. So Carl never quite unpacked when they got back from Krakow. He lived out of his suitcase.

Was it just because of the rent? In American terms, it was a negligible sum. Was Carl, though he had come to Prague as Jacob’s friend, leaving as Henry’s? Maybe there had been moments when Jacob, despite his caution, had come too close. Carl was so gentle he would never have let Jacob become aware of such moments, if there had been any. The doubt was in his mind the morning he found Carl cropping off handfuls of his beard in the bathroom. “Getting ready for America?” Jacob asked.

“I hadn’t thought of America,” Carl confessed. “Sure, for America.”

Jacob didn’t try to go behind Carl’s irony. Later, shaved and dressed, Carl said, as he rubbed his chin during breakfast, “It’s weird. It’s like that game Dead Man’s Hand. The nerves feel wrong. Did you ever play that?”

His cheeks were pale from having been hidden from the sun. There was something in the alteration that collapsed the past three and a half months. The revealed face was vulnerable, unfamiliar, and handsome, and it added to the friends’ unease with each other, as did their speculations about the Stehlíks’ plans for Carl’s room after he was gone. Between that room and Honza’s quarters lay another room still uncleared of junk, so there was a chance that nothing would be done with Carl’s room right away.