Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Prague was changing. There were rumors that the government was going to tighten the rules about foreign workers, which had been largely suspended in the first euphoria of revolution. Long-stay visas, it was said, would no longer be automatically renewed, and after a certain date it would no longer be legal for foreigners to work without a special visa. It was no longer going to be the Wild East. The teaching of English was falling more and more into the hands of business, which paid better but demanded more of a teacher’s time. To go over to the private companies was to lose much of one’s leisure and some of one’s sense of exemption from the marketplace and the obligation to be ranked by it.

None of Jacob’s friends had lost these things yet. When Carl relayed Melinda’s wish to meet Jacob on the afternoon of Carl’s good-bye party — the afternoon of Carl’s last full day in Prague — Jacob recognized in the invitation the sort of grand gesture that their freedom still made possible. “You don’t mind? It’s your last day.”

“She has something she wants to tell you,” Carl said, mysteriously.

They met at the entrance of the Convent of Saint Agnes, in the elbow of a bent street in the north end of Josefov. “You’d never have come here otherwise,” she said. “To see a girl and what’s more a saint.”

“I like girls.”

“My eye.”

A sandy yellow wall topped with red clay tiles hid the compound. The friends stepped through a door of metal bars, decorated with thorns, into a narrow alley. Windowless buildings hedged them in, and it wasn’t until they had zigzagged through several pale rooms, climbed a staircase, and come out into a long corridor with vaulted ceilings that Jacob had a sense of where they were.

They were standing in the nuns’ cloister. Along one wall, trios of windows shone sunlight into the room. Through the windows, Jacob saw a courtyard.

“Shall we sit outside for a moment?” Melinda asked.

She led him into the courtyard, where a walkway of loose white stones framed a green lawn. In one corner was the ruin of a well. In another, there stood a cherry tree. The tips of its dark branches were red with buds. Two folding chairs were angled so as to imply conversation, and Jacob and Melinda took possession of them.

“They’ve dumped the Czech nineteenth-century daubs in the chapter hall yonder, where the nuns used to sleep, but it’s the cloister here I wanted you to see, not the art.” The sun fell angrily on her white skin, which the long winter had kept from it. “It’s that kind of nineteenth-century art that every nation is so proud of having produced, but you have to be in a nostalgic mood and it has to be your nation before you can enjoy it.” She sat on her hands for a moment and straightened her back, in a schoolgirl’s stretch. “What’s rare is this,” she said, with no indicating gesture, trusting the environment to impress itself. She crossed her legs and sat up in her chair. “Thirteenth century. I imagine ladies in wimples holding hands as they walk the length of the cloister. As an aid to meditation. But I suppose that’s wrong somehow. One’s imaginings of history always are.”

There was something diagonal about the way she was sitting in her chair, not an effect of doubt but an implication of motion — the conflict of a wish in her to walk the cloister herself and a wish just as strong to remain seated and continue talking to Jacob. High in her cheeks a flush had risen to the sun’s challenge.

“The war between the simple and the pretty,” said Jacob.

“Poor Carl has had to hear my lectures twice,” she was reminded. “First from you, and then all over again from me, who gave them to you in the first place and can’t help giving them even to you yet again.”

“I bet he doesn’t mind.”

“He’s diplomatic.” The grass at their feet fluttered, like a boy’s hair being smoothed. “What I wanted to tell you,” she continued, “what I brought you here to tell you, is that I’m going away with him. Or rather, he’s coming away with me.” She glanced at Jacob and then for politeness’s sake studied the cherry tree.

“When?” Jacob asked.

“Tomorrow,” she answered. “I know,” she acknowledged.

“Where are you going?”

“I told my mother a few days ago that I was leaving Rafe, and it transpires that she has a friend with an apartment in Rome. It’s at our disposal for a month or so. It’s terrible. We aren’t being punished at all, and the car even makes it easy. That’s as far as we’ve planned. We’ll see at the end of a month whether we can still stand each other.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Rome.”

“You should! I’m recommending wild imprudence to everyone now. There’s something in it, I find.”

“What will you do for money?”

“What is it Mr. Micawber says?”

“What if—”

“It’s a risk, darling,” she interrupted him. She waited for a moment, while he gave up on trying to think of a way to make it safer for them. She continued: “The director of the school has told me I can never come back — that they’ll never even let such as me into the country again, if Klaus is given his head. But perhaps Klaus won’t be given his head. It seems a trifle excessive, eternal banishment simply for having given one’s démission to a language school two months early.”

“Breaking a contract, I guess.”

“Oh, don’t say it,” she requested. “Not you, too.”

“It’s only that they’d never have expected it of you. They’ll survive.”

“ You don’t feel that I’m abandoning you, do you? Though I suppose I am. You must write me. Send me the news from one who remains in the Czechoslovak Eden, once the gate has clanged shut behind me forever.”

A wind tossed the limbs of the cherry tree and chilled them, but the sun wasn’t going to let them get too cold. There was a luxury in coming to a museum and not seeing any of the art. In the middle ages they might have been a noble brother and sister whose family had given a herd of sheep and who had come to find out what the nuns had made of the gift.

“So Kaspar was wrong,” he hazarded.

“Oh, maybe it’s to spite him,” she thought aloud.

“Maybe what is?”

She considered before answering. “It’s mortifying to say, and you’ll say it isn’t any of your business,” she began. “Still, nothing has happened.”

He thought he understood.

“I don’t mean absolutely nothing. You know what I mean.”

“I think so,” he answered carefully.

“And what’s more, I’m not in love with him,” she announced. “It’s too soon.”

He hesitated. “Are you just friends?”

“Oh god no.” She seemed to feel sorry that she had confused him. “I’ve made a muddle of explaining.”

“It doesn’t have to be clear to me.”

“The not having to say is what I’ve fallen for.”

“You have fallen.”

“But I don’t have to say. It’s sort of a holiday.”

“I think I see.” By the time this cherry tree flowered, he would have lost both of them, and by the time the flowers fell, they would probably have lost each other. “You’re a pair of rogues,” he said, to make light of it.

They sat together a while longer, imagining a tour of the scriptorium, in the course of which they would compliment the nuns’ progress on a book of hours, commissioned long ago and years overdue.

* * *

The first to arrive at the farewell party was Annie. When the buzzer rang, Jacob set down a glass and the towel with which he had been drying it and ran to the window. “Here,” he said, leaning out and dangling Henry’s keys. “Catch.”

“I won’t do,” she said from below. “You may drop them if you like, but I shan’t ‘catch,’ thank you very much.”