Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“But I don’t want to stay,” Jacob said. “We will leave within twenty-four hours.” He felt a princely autonomy. He left Mr. Stehlík behind in the kitchen and went to his bedroom to begin packing.

* * *

Jacob opened the doubled set of windows in his bedroom. A drizzle was falling, and above the concrete barriers across the street, he could see heavy clouds traveling east, toward the Stehlíks’ house, and breaking up, as they approached, to reveal ribs of blue as they passed over it.

While Jacob was fussing with the zippers and compartments of his backpack, Carl came in and sat on the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” Carl offered.

Jacob shrugged and kept fussing. “I would guess it’s a puritanical thing, but there are nudie pictures in the bathroom upstairs,” he observed.

“But Honza had to get married, didn’t he.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You have to find a new place,” Carl insisted.

Jacob shrugged again. He cared only that he would soon be without the kindness that when he looked up he saw in Carl’s face. “It’s just a gorilla problem,” Jacob said.

Jacob showed up with Carl on Henry’s doorstep, his Olivetti and a backpack full of clothes already in tow. Henry welcomed him despite not having invited him, as Jacob had known he would. There was only one sofa in Henry’s living room, Henry apologized, but there was room for a second sleeping bag on the floor. Jacob promised to move into the cafá on Na , for the private English lessons that he was giving to her and her friend. In her absence he was hailed, as he left the Stehlíks’ villa, by her mother, who was hanging wet laundry on the white rubberized cords strung across the family’s small yard.

“Kubo,” Mrs. Stehlíková said, placing a damp shirt over one shoulder so that her hands were free to mime the meaning of her words, “já mám velké srdce.” With her index fingers she traced in the air before her the symmetrical outline of the large heart that she was explaining that she had, then patted her bosom. She nodded. “Rozumíš?” Do you understand?

— Thank you, Jacob said. — Until the next sighting.

As a temporary home for Václav, Henry lent Jacob a steel tureen with a lid, though he warned that he would have to borrow it back if they should decide to boil spaghetti. Improvisation seemed to be the theme of Henry’s housekeeping. On their first night, Carl and Jacob had to shift piles of laundry and stacks of paperbacks in order to make room for their sleeping bags, and there was no sense that any item in the kitchen belonged in one place rather than another — flour, bowls, sardine tins, tea, frying pans, drinking glasses, salt, potatoes, and Marmite mixed in perfect democracy on the shelves and countertops. Jacob fell nonetheless a little bit in love with being Henry’s guest. Henry had assembled more than a dozen different spices, whose Czech names Jacob had not seen often enough to learn, and Jacob went through them, uncapping and sniffing to educate himself. Henry also made Jacob welcome to his washing machine, and since Jacob didn’t know when he might next find one, he washed everything he owned, strewing the apartment with wet clothes, laying socks across sills, draping pants over chair backs, and hooking shirts over doorknobs and window levers. Before falling asleep at night, he read at random from Henry’s paperbacks. Maumauing the Flak-Catchers. The Road to Wigan Pier. In the shower one morning, he even tried Henry’s shampoo, surreptitiously.

With Henry personally, Jacob was a little stiff, though Henry, for his part, seemed at ease. He may even have welcomed the distraction that Jacob’s presence made. He had, after all, been expecting the company of Carl, but Carl didn’t show up until Sunday night. Upon overhearing Melinda’s news, a Czech woman who taught at the language school had lent her the key to her Prague apartment, which she didn’t need because she was headed to a friend’s chata in the country for the weekend. Not knowing she had gone home with Carl, not seeing her Friday morning or afternoon, Rafe had developed the hope that she suffered as much from the separation as he did and had convinced himself that he might be able to persuade her to accept a year or two in Kazakhstan if he promised to look for a desk in Berlin or Paris afterward. When she disillusioned him, he turned stoic, uncharacteristically businesslike, or so Melinda later described him to Carl. He wished her the best; he didn’t want to hear any details. She began to cry and apologized for crying, saying she knew it was unfair for her to be the one to cry. Rafe agreed that it was unfair, but “for old times’ sake,” he said, he was willing to tell her that he thought she would be all right. Then he asked her to leave.

On Monday, Melinda moved to the apartment of another colleague, who was willing to let Melinda sleep on her sofa. Melinda was resisting Annie’s attempts to install her at the . She was spending as much time with Carl as she could manage to. After the weekend, the two passed their hours together in cafés and museums, since they had no other privacy, but it was what they were used to. Annie reported this news while signing Jacob up at the , on Tuesday after work. The was clean, bright, Brutalist, and very far from anything else, Jacob discovered — it was at the southern end of the longest subway line. He left without a key because one did not carry a key out of the building but rather traded it at the front desk for a card in a cellophane sleeve with one’s name and room number and an official stamp. On the tedious subway ride back to Henry’s, Jacob stared at his name, handwritten on the card in blue ink. He would stay at the if he had to, he promised himself; he wouldn’t impose on Henry past Friday, the day of Carl’s departure. But he didn’t think it would come to that. He had been asking his students to let him know if they heard of any apartments.

The hunt for a place to stay kept him so busy that it was only when Henry suggested that they throw a good-bye party for Carl that Jacob became aware of a dull ache in his side and wondered how long he had been pretending to himself that he didn’t feel it. When Henry made the suggestion, Jacob had just come from seeing an apartment in Žižkov, behind the National Museum. It was in a large 1930s building, and the nominal tenant was a mother who had moved in with her unmarried son in another part of town. Her relocation had been kept a secret from the authorities, who might feel obliged to redistribute the property if they knew. It wasn’t certain that under the new dispensation the authorities were still enforcing such redistributions, but as a matter of prudence, the son asked Jacob to say that he was a cousin from America, if any neighbors inquired, and it would be better if Jacob didn’t talk to the neighbors at all, if he could manage to dodge them. The rooms themselves were worn-in and comfortable, with curtains of thin polyester lace on the windows, likable bad paintings of rural landscapes on the walls, and discordant patterns and clashing colors on the wallpaper, duvet cover, and carpet. As at the Stehlíks’, there was a second bedroom crammed full of heirlooms and unused furniture, for which the son, who was showing the apartment, apologized with some embarrassment. Jacob was to have the use of a less cluttered bedroom, one of whose three chests of drawers would be emptied for him. There was also a bathroom and a kitchen. One window gave onto slopes of red clay roof tiles; another overlooked a private garden four stories below. The language school was late with Jacob’s monthly pay, a recurring problem recently, but Jacob told the man that as soon as his salary arrived — as soon as Friday, he hoped — he would pay the rent and move in.