Necessary Errors: A Novel Read online

  Praise for Caleb Crain’s

  Necessary Errors

  “Caleb Crain has written a novel of surpassing intelligence and unexpected beauty about a young American’s year in post-Communist Prague—and about how we find, and construct, the story of our lives. His great achievement is to make the unfolding of Jacob Putnam’s newfound sexual freedom resonate with the unfolding of Czechs’ new historical freedoms, so these separate arcs seem of a piece. His precision of description, whether of architecture or emotional weather, is enviable; his dialogue both playful and profound. It is rare to read a book of this length and feel that every sentence mattered, rarer still to finish a novel of such intellectual depth and be so moved.”

  —Amy Waldman, author of The Submission

  “Youth and innocence—remember them? Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors stabs the heart with the story of Jacob Putnam’s sentimental education in Prague, and reminds us that to be young is to live abroad in a fallen empire where the talk goes on all night, the dumplings are sliced thick, and blue jeans are rare and too expensive. Pick this novel up and you won’t forget it.”

  —Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True

  “As someone who is often unduly nostalgic about having been in her twenties during the 1990s (though not for as good a reason as having been in Prague during the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution), this novel triggered something like a sense memory. Caleb Crain is remarkable at capturing that time in life when ambition and longing are at once all-consuming and all over the map. I winced in self-recognition more than once—and marveled at the author’s insights more often than that.”

  —Meghan Daum, author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

  “Caleb Crain describes a young man’s and a country’s first tastes of freedom with a lucid and matter-of-fact intelligence. Necessary Errors offers an invaluable record of Prague at the beginning of the 1990s in a style that places it among the great novels of Americans abroad. It’s The Ambassadors for the generation that came of age with the downfall of the Soviet Union.”

  —Marco Roth, author of The Scientists

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever read a novel that gets down, the way this one does, how it felt to be an American and a gay man at the end of the Cold War—so exiled from the country you grew up in that you go abroad to make a new world. Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors is an adventure of the head and heart. His hero, Jacob, turns to the cafés, bedrooms, and libraries of newly free Eastern Europe, an American in search of a European bildungsroman, in search of love and possibility both.”

  —Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh

  Caleb Crain has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, and n+1. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is the author of the critical work American Sympathy. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  ALSO BY CALEB CRAIN

  American Sympathy:

  Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © Caleb Crain, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “That it will never come again” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.

  The author thanks Elaine Blair, Jonathan Bolton, Leo Carey, Benjamin Kunkel, Lorin Stein, and Peter Terzian for their insights into an early draft. He thanks Sarah Chalfant and Jacqueline Ko at the Wylie Agency and Allison Lorentzen, Patrick Nolan, Lindsay Prevette, and the rest of the team at Penguin for shepherding the book into print.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Crain, Caleb.

  Necessary errors : a novel / Caleb Crain.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61365-8

  I. Title.

  PS3603.R359N43 2013

  813’.6—dc23

  2013006551

  Designed by Elke Sigal

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Peter

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Staré Mesto

  Vyšehrad

  Šárka

  This epoch of unexpected happiness and drunkenness lasted only two short years; the madness was so excessive and so general that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it, except by this historical and penetrating reflection: the people had been bored for a hundred years.

  —Stendhal

  It was October, and the leaves of the oaks around the language school had turned gold and were batting light into its tall windows. A young Irish woman was seated alone in the teacher’s lounge. She had made herself a cup of tea on the range in the corner, and she was opening a tangerine on a paper napkin, with hungry carelessness.

  One of the American teachers walked in. “Are you always the first one here?” he asked.

  “It’s quite far, the trip from the . I like to collect myself.” Her hair was disorderly and thick, and had all the colors between blond and red that you might find on a peach. When she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she didn’t always meet a person’s gaze.

  The American sat down opposite her. He was younger than she was.

  “Would you like some?” she asked doubtfully, offering the tangerine. “I wouldn’t offer if poxy Thom and all of them were here, but seeing how it’s only you…” She neatly turned off a cluster of three of the fruit’s plump wedges and put them on the corner of the napkin closest to him.

  “You eat it. You need the vitamins.”

  “My mother sent them to me,” she continued. “You can’t find tangerines in bloody Prague. But you’ll spoil it if you don’t take some now I’ve offered it to you specially.”

  He ate one of the wedges. “Thanks,” he said. He took out his keys.

  “I quite like having a cabinet with a key of my own, don’t you?” she said. “I feel as if I’m an established person.”

  “It’s very grown-up.”

  “Well, it may not be such a new experience for you.” She had abruptly dropped the color from her voice. “As a Harv. No doubt you had lockers and such.”

  “I’ve never had a serious job before.”

  “Your man Rafe”—it was spelled Ralph, but Rafe was how everyone pronounced it, even though he was American—“your man Rafe started teaching here with us but then they asked him over the castle.”

&nb
sp; “What does he do there? No one will tell me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s peculiar that there are so many of you? Harvs, I mean. You’re like rabbits or something. You’re all Agency, aren’t you. That’s what they call it, you know.”

  “Agency?”

  “Didn’t you know? I imagine you’re not one of them then, Jacob.”

  “How do you know what they call it?”

  “From the telly.”

  She gathered the tangerine rind in her napkin, as if she were folding up a tiny picnic, and dropped it in the can beneath the sink. After she rinsed her hands, she sniffed the backs of her fingers quickly. “Are you coming to Mel and Rafe’s on Saturday?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I was invited.”

  “Melinda’s going to invite you this afternoon. She told me last night.”

  He hesitated. “I was thinking of going to a bar.”

  “Oh?”

  “A gay bar,” he added.

  “Oh? I had no idea—not that you would care if I did. It’s not the sort of thing a person would expect, to look at you.”

  He glanced at the door. “No one else knows.”

  “Oh, I’m good with secrets. A proper crypt.” She watched him pinch the corners of the workbooks in front of him, to square the stack. “Shall we have a smoke on it?”

  “Would you like a Marlboro?”

  “Ehm, do you happen to have the light ones again today?” He flashed the pack. “Do you fancy Thom, then?” she asked, as they stood up.

  “He seems awfully straight.”

  “He’s such a New Lad. Too much of a lad for me. I don’t fancy him, though he’s a fine specimen, really.”

  “Are you telling lies about me again, Annie?” said Thom, coming into the lounge just as they were leaving it. He was a Scot with straight, tow hair and a Roman nose. “I heard the word ‘lad,’ used disparagingly I thought.”

  “Oh, bugger off,” Annie answered out of habit. Then she added, “I mean…”

  “Off for a smoke? Mind if I join you?”

  The headmistress allowed them to smoke in what had been the shower, back in the First Republic, when the building had served as a day school for girls. There were square, cream-colored tiles on the walls and floor. Every few feet a pipe curved out of the wall, and then up and over, like an upside-down candleholder. Far above were windows, which someone kept surprisingly clean, and light came down from them as from a clerestory.

  Thom hung his red jacket and his satchel on one of the hooks once intended for the girls’ towels. Jacob offered his cigarettes. “Do you mind?” Thom asked as he took one. “It’s a pleasant change from a Sparta.”

  “And are you going to come to Mel and Rafe’s?” Annie asked.

  “I think I will do, yes. Shall I see you there?”

  She nodded as she inhaled. “You aren’t going to be gallivanting about with loose Czech women.”

  “Not on Saturday night, no. And you, Jacob?”

  “I’m supposed to meet a friend.”

  “You could meet your friend another night, Jacob,” Annie interposed.

  “Well, I’ll see.”

  Later in the day, over a quick cigarette between classes, Annie told him that she hoped he was careful. “You know, poxy rubbers and all.”

  * * *

  A dead pig was hanging, face down, beside the door to Jacob’s apartment. Blood drained into a plastic bucket from the hollow where its guts had been taken out. One stream ran in a wet line down from the pig’s fore chest and around its neck, where it met another falling through and out of its snout and mouth. The animal’s skin was thick and pearly. Blue-and-white twine, tied around its hind trotters, suspended it from the balustrade at the top of the stairwell. The Stehlíks, who owned the building, lived up there; the pig must have come from their cottage in the country. Jacob pulled his eyes away and went inside.

  He rented rooms that Mrs. Stehlík’s parents had once lived in: a bath, a kitchen, and a bedroom. Sometimes , the Stehlíks’ grown daughter, who went by the name , knocked and used the bath. The bedroom had been a living room until recently; in fact, Jacob slept on a couch, or rather, on three of its orange foam panels, which he laid end to end on the floor at night like dominoes, and covered with his zipped-open nylon sleeping bag in order to keep off the chill that sometimes rose through the floor. The furniture was plywood, painted white, and the curtains, like the couch, were orange. Along one of the bedroom walls ran a low, built-in sideboard, its shelves backed with speckled mirrors, where the Stehlíks must have displayed crystal and china while the grandparents were alive. Jacob kept a few books there: a guide to Prague, a Czech-French dictionary (all the city’s bookstores had sold out of Czech-English ones), and Pléiades of Rousseau and Stendhal from the 1930s, which he had found while looking for the dictionary. There were too few books to obscure the mirror. On the floor at night he faced away from it so he wouldn’t have to see himself not sleeping.

  A window in the bedroom faced west onto a small lawn, a sidewalk, and a jagged concrete wall that protected the house from the noise and dirt of a highway. A window in the kitchen faced east onto a courtyard where Mrs. Stehlíková hung the laundry on Wednesdays and where beat the family’s rugs on weekends, stagily coughing, waving, and blinking to entertain herself. Someone had put a woven red tablecloth in the kitchen, to brighten the room, and Jacob was slowly ruining it with a candle that he lit at his dinners to cheer himself up. He hadn’t thought to put down a plate to catch the wax until too late.

  He had only himself for company. Sometimes he had the feeling, which one may have if one lives alone, that time had paused for him, though perhaps in this apartment only, as if, canoeing along Time, he had turned into a still inlet. The rooms were the same from day to day, uninterrupted. Was the feeling a safe or a dangerous one? He would turn on the hot water tap in the kitchen just to hear the soft boom as a large purple flower of gas ignited and then focused in the tall white metal heater near the ceiling. There was a similar heater in the bathroom, larger and even more ebullient in its ignitions. If he was at home when the sun set, he would sit on the floor in a corner of the bedroom, his back against the couch’s front, eyes closed, a glass of water folded between his hands in his lap, and let the light warm his face and arms. He always got up just before the light was going to pass, so he would not have the feeling of its leaving him.

  The sight of the pig had taken away his appetite, but there would be no food in the apartment unless he went to the stores before they closed, so he picked up his small backpack and headed out.

  In the hallway, he met , who was just returning from the stores, her mesh bag in hand.

  —I go for food, he said in his simple Czech.

  “You do not want…,” she began in English, and rolled her eyes toward the hanging cadaver. “How do you say?”

  “Pork?” Jacob supplied. —Maybe later, he added in Czech. —But it’s pretty.

  —Pretty? She blinked and stepped back from it, her frizzy black hair aquiver. —It’s large, she declared, —and dreadful.

  “Who has to butcher it?” he asked in English, with a little sawing gesture, which she watched with horror.

  —Mother and I. She smiled at him fixedly as if the injustice of it were the best part.

  —That is dreadful, really.

  She shrugged. “You want to help, perhaps?” she asked, in English again.

  “Oh no, no. You’d better go ahead and start without me.”

  She echoed the sentence, to teach herself the phrase, then answered him: “Okay.” In her voice he could hear her pride in knowing the American word.

  * * *

  In the shadow of the ugly sheltering wall it was cold, and Jacob was sorry he hadn’t put on his sweatshirt under his raincoat. He didn’t have his real winter clothes yet; his mother was going to mail them soon. Three houses down, a border collie ran to the fence as he approached and began to bark industriously. PES, read a little tin sign in black and w
hite. Evil dog, was the literal translation. Jacob could see in the collie’s eyes that if the fence hadn’t been there it would have let him pass quietly. The fence was a kind of permission to bark, maybe even an obligation. As soon as Jacob stepped past the yard, the collie fell silent and trotted back to its doormat on the front steps, where it curled up to save its warmth.

  None of the laws liberalizing commerce had yet gone into effect, so the stores were still run on the old system and bore their old, plain names: foodstuffs; meat; fruits and vegetables; frozen goods. As if to emphasize their plainness, the words appeared on the signs in lower-case. The stores were lodged in an L-shaped, two-story mall of rough cement. Jacob pushed through a delicate chrome turnstile to enter the largest one, which was on the ground floor. There were only three aisles, and most of the shelves were empty. In the back, however, there was a great mound of bottled beer, without any labels on the brown glass; only the metal caps told you the brand was Staropramen, which Jacob liked. It was absurdly cheap, but it was absurdly cheap in pubs and bars, too, so Jacob never bought any here. There were no spare shopping baskets, because it was the end of the day and the store was crowded, so Jacob cradled in the crook of his left arm the groceries he found: a rectangular paper sack of rice, a jar of half-pickled red cabbage, a brick of butter in foil, and milk in a clear plastic bag with blue stenciling. With tongs he put into a small white paper sack five rohlíky, Czech croissants, slightly pasty in flavor. They were straight, like swollen fingers, because at some point, under socialism, the traditional curve had been eliminated as frivolous. He approached a board where sour brown bread was stacked. He wanted a quarter loaf, which he risked picking up with a bare hand. Last, at an unplugged refrigerator cabinet against the wall, he picked up a white paper sack of eggs. The sack was the same kind as for rohlíky, but with six eggs already inside, the top neatly crimped shut. He balanced it on the bag of milk, reasoning that the milk might provide cushioning, like a waterbed.