Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Sleep, sleep,” Carl urged him.

“I’m already awake.” He couldn’t resist keeping them company. He wanted too badly to know what they were going to do. For decency’s sake he put on last night’s clothes, which still had the sour smell of cigarettes.

“Perhaps I should press on,” Melinda suggested, once they had assembled in the kitchen.

“Have you met Václav?” Jacob asked.

“I haven’t.”

“He needs some water,” Jacob noticed, and took the hamster’s dish to the sink to refill it.

“Why don’t you eat something first?” Carl said.

“We have one kind of rohlík and four kinds of jam,” Jacob offered. He opened the refrigerator to show off the preserves. “Land of plenty.”

“Do the two of you have the stomach for breakfast?” she asked.

“I always do,” Jacob answered.

“If I wait a bit, Rafe will have gone to the ministry,” she thought out loud.

“Better stay.”

“I’m no good at this.”

Jacob insisted. “I know that French people like warm chocolate milk for breakfast, but I don’t know what English people like.”

“Are those eggs in that tell-tale white paper sack? Perhaps one could make an omelet.”

She cracked the eggs efficiently. She flinched slightly when the butter sputtered and slid across the hot pan. Carl stood beside her as he waited for the water to boil. Jacob could tell that the two of them were willing their bodies not to speak. Jacob felt more than ever that he was living in Prague in a way that he had never lived in America. Even the commonest thing was an adventure. Nothing like this had ever happened to him in America, even if it wasn’t quite to him that this, whatever it was, was happening.

“What?” Melinda asked, provoked by Jacob’s observation of her. “I swear, you look at me sometimes as if you think I’m starkers.”

“No.”

“You’re having thoughts, I can tell.”

“You can stay here if you like,” Jacob offered.

“You mean, if I have to. That’s very kind, but I can doss down at the , you know. It’s my right as a teacher. Annie will set me up. She’s offered to before.”

“Don’t they keep track of your comings and goings?”

“Oh, it’s socialism. There’s no mistaking it. It would be like taking to a nunnery at the end of a novel.”

“After the rogue leaves,” suggested Jacob.

“Hey,” said Carl.

Jacob offered to take his shower, to give them time alone, but Melinda said the omelet was ready. She folded it over and cut it into thirds. They ate it fiercely. In the end, they all had jam on rohlíky , too.

In his room, Jacob spent a long time there pretending to choose what he was going to wear. Eventually Melinda came to find him. “Now I really must go.”

“Do you remember how to get out?”

“Perhaps you could offer a hint.”

Jacob padded back into the kitchen — where Melinda gave Carl a hurried embrace — and leaned out the door of their apartment. “Just out that door,” Jacob said, pointing to the building’s entrance, “then left around the building, and left again at the street. The tram stop is at the corner.”

“Brilliant, love.”

Honza was emerging from his apartment. Melinda didn’t stay for introductions, and when Jacob waved good morning, Honza nodded and winked knowingly, before heading upstairs to check in for the day with his employer.

“Honza saw us,” Jacob reported.

“Honza’s a man of the world,” Carl said, and went back to bed.

They were never to know whether Honza told or whether Mr. Stehlík found out on his own. The knock came just ten minutes later.

Mr. Stehlík seemed to have to stoop to come in through the door, his anger made him so tall. He took a position beside the kitchen table, his feet planted wide, his gray hair stiff and martial.

“Mr. Jacob, we must talk,” he began.

“Okay.”

“Mr. Jacob, this is not right,” he said, pointing at the stovetop, where the omelet pan lay, still wet with butter.

“We were just cooking breakfast,” Jacob said. “I was going to clean the pan in a minute.”

“No, Mr. Jacob. This.” He was pointing, Jacob now saw, not at the pan but spots of old pancake batter, sauce, and soup on the stovetop itself. Jacob had been putting off scrubbing it. “Mouses will come,” Mr. Stehlík added.

“Sorry,” said Jacob. “I’ll clean it tonight.”

“You have shoes on carpet,” Mr. Stehlík continued, pointing at the path that they walked through the kitchen en route to their bedrooms. In the course of his construction work, Honza had scattered debris in the foyer, and Jacob and Carl had tracked some of it inside. It didn’t look ineradicable.

“In America we don’t take off our shoes indoors.”

“In Czech, yes. In Czech nation, no shoes.”

“I’ll take them off if it’s important to you. If I could borrow your vacuum cleaner…,” Jacob proposed, but Mr. Stehlík didn’t seem to recognize the word for the device and moved impatiently to his last and gravest charge.

“And Mr. Jacob, is not hotel.” He glared at Jacob after delivering the words. His face was ashen with rage.

“We were out with some friends,” Jacob said as pleasantly as he could, “and one of them lives on the other side of town, so it was easier for her to stay over here.”

“Is not hotel!” Mr. Stehlík shouted.

Mr. Stehlík was a powerful man, in the prime of his life. Jacob’s heart thudded effortfully, thickly. What he could see of the world shrank to just Mr. Stehlík at the center. Mr. Stehlík was a man accustomed to punishing, but Jacob had come out of that box and did not want to go back into it. What’s more, Jacob was innocent. He had on his side the counterposing fury of innocence.

“What’s going on?” asked Carl, who had come quietly in from his room.

Mr. Stehlík ignored him. “You are my guest, Mr. Jacob. Mr. Carl is your guest and my guest. But is not hotel. No.”

“Oh, I see,” said Carl.

“Is dirty , Mr. Carl,” Mr. Stehlík said, pointing to the stovetop again.

“So I heard,” said Carl. “Mouses will come.”

Jacob wished Carl hadn’t taken the risk of being detected in mockery. “It’s normal to have guests,” Jacob said. “It’s part of living somewhere.”

“Not in my house. One, two. No more.”

It occurred to Jacob that Mr. Stehlík might not know that he was supposed to be charging for wear and tear. “Maybe we’re still not paying you enough,” Jacob suggested. “Under capitalism the rent is supposed to be high enough that the landlord can afford to repair the damage that happens in normal use.”

Mr. Stehlík stepped forward. “Is not money,” he said quietly in Jacob’s face, so close that Jacob winced at his stale smoker’s breath. “Is my house .”

Jacob remembered, in what did not at first seem to be a consecutive thought, the ski bags that had held grandparents. He recalled the strangeness of their presence by the driveway.

Carl was to go to Henry’s the next day, anyway. Jacob himself could stay at the , if he had to. But he probably wouldn’t have to. There was a market for Prague apartments now. And in the interim maybe he, too, could stay with Henry.

“Fine,” Jacob said, turning away from Mr. Stehlík coldly. “We will leave.”

“Pardon?” Mr. Stehlík asked. “You do not need leave.”