Necessary Errors: A Novel Read online

  It was a bribe offered not from an intention to corrupt but from a wish to be pleasant to a new friend. The man’s skin hung loosely at his wrists and under his cheekbones, Jacob saw, as if he had recently lost more weight than he could afford to. He was like a monk who, in a misplaced spirit of penance, was offering to sell short his and his brothers’ labors. “Really, I don’t have your excuse.”

  “Is it only an excuse?”

  Rafe interrupted: “I feel obliged to warn you, Jacob, that Kaspar was anti-Communist only until the Berlin Wall was breached, and then switched sides.”

  Kaspar glanced at Rafe. “I sound so contrary, in your story of me,” he said. “In reality I had no choice. So many horrible people were becoming anti-Communist that day. It was an opportunity for them. They were my—what is the word? In Czech they are called .”

  “Weathervanes,” Rafe supplied.

  “They were my weathervanes,” Kaspar continued. “If they were willing to betray Communism, there was something in the idea after all.”

  “So he’s not going to agree that it’s harder to be a writer under Communism than capitalism,” Jacob said, addressing Rafe.

  “No, he’s probably not,” Rafe answered.

  “I am not an optimist,” Kaspar said, “except about spirit.”

  Jacob was embarrassed for Kaspar. The avowal reminded him of people he knew from school with high but vague ambitions, who after graduation had moved to bad neighborhoods and taken jobs supposedly beneath them, in order not to be reminded of the larger competition they hadn’t wished to enter.

  “Are you a writer?” Jacob asked politely.

  “Ah, no, only a translator.”

  “And a smuggler, eh?” Rafe boasted on Kaspar’s behalf. “Countless Czech manuscripts reached their German publishers through Kaspar.”

  “I worked in a hospital,” Kaspar explained, “In such a place it is easier to judge whether a person may be trusted.”

  “What do you do now?” Jacob asked.

  “Why, I teach with you in the language school.”

  “He teaches German,” Rafe said.

  Jacob noticed that he still had the cimbalom mallets in his hands. He addressed Rafe: “You were going to say where you got this.”

  “The director of the symphony asked me to take it home for a while,” Rafe said.

  “The symphony?” Jacob echoed, but Rafe drifted away to answer the door again.

  Kaspar intercepted Jacob’s look of puzzlement. “Rafe, for example, is a person often trusted.”

  The room was filling up. Thom had arrived with a fellow Scot named Michael and with Henry, a wiry Englishman with wide set eyes and curly hair, who had lived in Prague since before the change. Henry was responsible for bringing the Scots to Prague. He had met them while studying philosophy in Edinburgh, and after arriving in Prague he had sent back word of teaching opportunities. Jacob recognized several other teachers from the school as well, and Annie was emerging, with the tentative, cautious steps of a cat, from the kitchen where they had left her.

  “Did Rafe help you with the smuggling?” Jacob asked.

  “Oh no. He wasn’t working here then.”

  Having fetched a beer, Thom came over. “Have you brought me a ham by any chance, Mr. Putnam?”

  “I haven’t seen the thing for a couple of days, actually.”

  “Jacob’s landlords hung an entire pig beside his door,” Thom explained to the group. “Trying to send him a message, we think.”

  “‘Go home, Yank’?” Michael proposed. He was a big man who wore a black fisherman’s cap to hide his thinning hair and was never serious.

  “It’s quite impressive,” Thom said, “an entire pig, especially now, when there are no potatoes in the shops. I recommend you stay on good terms with your landlords.”

  “I thought it was just my local store that didn’t have potatoes,” Jacob said.

  Henry explained: “The farmers are holding back anything that will keep until January, when the market prices take effect.” Like Kaspar and Rafe, he spoke Czech fluently and learned such things easily.

  “Is that so, professor,” Thom said.

  “But hops and barley fall under a different law,” Henry continued, “so you needn’t worry about your Staropramen.”

  “As if my supply of Staropramen were the limit of my interest in the Czechoslovak economy. I thank you for that.” He took a drink for punctuation.

  “Drunken sod,” Michael commented. All the Scots looked up to Henry, and they only allowed so much raillery of him.

  “What’s that?” Thom replied. “I thought I heard the sound of a pot addressing a kettle.”

  Thom offered around his Sparty, and Jacob took one because he was out of Marlboros. Annie, too, stepped up at the sight of the distribution. Her presence didn’t disrupt the coarse, boyish back-and-forth; she highlighted it, rather, by objecting to the men’s vulgarities with an imperfectly disguised pleasure and by saying, several times, that she expected no better from them. For his part Jacob loved the coarseness, because it meant they did not suspect him; he was one of them, so long as he, too, was insulted freely. He didn’t want them to watch themselves around him; he wanted to belong.

  Later, Jacob and Annie found a corner. “Your new friend seems very taken with you,” she began.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, startled.

  “Kaspar.”

  For a moment, he had thought that the details of his visit to T-Club had got out somehow. “Oh, Kaspar. Did you know he taught at the school?”

  “Oh yes. He made a comment the other day to the headmistress about my accent. He doesn’t even teach English, mind you. Said I was likely to mislead the students. And Thom’s accent, as well.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “As if our ways of speaking were inferior. That they are different I don’t deny. But some people would think it an advantage to the students to be exposed to them.”

  “He couldn’t have meant it. He seems to have a thing for the underdog.”

  “If the underdog is a Harv with running hot water and a full larder. His beady little eyes lit up when Rafe said he knew you from university.”

  “We didn’t actually know each other. We more or less have to take each other’s word for it that we were both there.”

  “No, you published some poem in the school paper, and Rafe read it.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “It’s quite sweet, really, that he remembers it.” She took a moment to survey the party as it was taking place around them. “Mind you, I don’t say I dislike Kaspar.”

  “You just said he had beady little eyes!”

  “Did I? He’s quite kind at times. When one’s out of sorts.”

  The air was misty with cigarette smoke, now, and there was a pleasant din—all talk and laughter, because Mel and Rafe had no stereo. “I’m sorry you felt down,” Jacob ventured.

  “I daresay you haven’t noticed, and why would you, really, but all the women from the West either brought a man with them or found one immediately they got here. It’s different for the men, of course.”

  “That’s such an impersonal way of looking at it.”

  “But I think I’m right. Not that I mind enormously, but I had to think it through. Now did you really meet no one last night? I don’t want to hear if it’s too sordid. Because I had a friend in Berlin…” She left the sentence unfinished.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, late in the afternoon, knocked on Jacob’s door. He had lain down for a nap after work and when he answered was not fully awake. “Shower?” he asked her, offering the use of it with a gesture.

  “No, no,” she shook her curls. “You have telephone. Upstairs. Come, come. Father is not home yet.”

  As she nervously glanced behind, as if afraid her father might suddenly appear, he followed her up into the Stehlíks’ apartment, with its brown-and-green-patterned wallpaper and its red-and-gold-patterned carpets. Mrs. Stehlíková, in the kitchen, silently o
ut-whistled a long drag on a cigarette when she saw him, then grinned and nodded, blinking like her daughter, in welcome. On the stove behind her were two simmering pots, a stew for her family, she explained, and an even larger one for their two dogs, who greeted Jacob by nosing at his crotch.

  “Come, come,” beckoned. In the living room, she handed him the phone’s persimmon-colored receiver and then retreated.

  “Hello?” Jacob said into the phone, the base of which, brown with white keys, sat on a tea tray. He perched on the edge of an easy chair of fake green leather.

  “Halló? Kubo?”

  “Ota?” Jacob asked, though he hadn’t given Ota his number.

  —No, replied the speaker, in Czech. —Luboš here. Am I speaking with Jacob?

  “Yes, sorry,” Jacob answered, in English. “I didn’t recognize your voice.” He was upset with himself at the misstep. He had thought of Ota because it was Ota who had explained the nickname Kuba to him. Of course he had been hoping for Luboš.

  —Please? asked Luboš, not having understood.

  —Nothing, nothing, Jacob assured him hurriedly. It was much harder to communicate on the phone than in person, Jacob realized. There was an awkward pause. Jacob’s eyes were caught by two African-style wooden masks on the opposite wall, one smiling, another frowning, like Tragedy and Comedy. He nervously pressed his fingers between adjacent revolutions of the phone cord’s cool spiral.

  —Want to meet? Luboš asked, speaking as simply as possible.

  —Yes, said Jacob. —When?

  —Tomorrow, at eighteen hours. At .

  —Underground?

  —No. In the street. Under the clock, across from the Automat.

  —Yes, Jacob said again, knowing the large, ugly clock that Luboš had in mind. It sat on the roof of a glass building at the foot of Wenceslas Square, where the word DISCO, in a sans-serif font, appeared in the windows of the top floor, one letter per pane.

  He and Luboš fell silent again. Having succeeded in their negotiation, it was now a comfortable silence, maybe even a confident one. There was a thrill in arranging a date while in a room that spoke so much of family, even if the family wasn’t his. On the near wall hung a medieval Slavic icon, or a replica of one, a madonna’s face painted in oil and set in a costume and landscape of silver, like one of those old sideshow attractions where a cousin pokes her head through a hole in a signboard so that her face appears over the body of a circus strongman, or under the top hat of a lion tamer cracking a whip, another cousin’s face figuring as the lion.

  —I look forward, said Luboš.

  —I, too. A great deal. The energy that ordinarily went into complicating or refining one’s speech instead had to be devoted to simplifying it. It wasn’t possible to mislead each other, Jacob decided, when it took so much effort merely to reach across the space between them.

  * * *

  Jacob left the subway station and walked up Wenceslas Square, away from where Luboš would be waiting, in order to buy a Western newsweekly he liked at one of the few stands that sold it. The sun had not gone down, but it could not be seen. So neutral was the twilight, in fact, that instead of fading from behind the leaden clouds above, it seemed to be settling out of the air one walked through, as if it were a kind of dust. It sharpened the outlines and details of the buildings but dissolved what little color they had into a uniform gray. Jacob couldn’t have said why he was going out of his way. As he had traveled toward , his wish to buy the magazine had grown more and more urgent, until, upon arrival, he had had no choice, even though he was late and the detour would make him later. Only when he had it in hand did he feel armed. He waved it, rolled in a fist, at Luboš when he sighted him. Running across the granite bricks, he wondered if Luboš had seen him. There were so many eyes carved in Prague’s façades, belonging to caryatids, masks, reliefs of politicians, and the figures of ideals, that one was never free of the sense of being observed.

  They greeted each other in Czech. Jacob searched Luboš’s face for a sign of what would happen between them tonight, a hint of what footing they stood on. It was not a soft or a warm face, though it was not unkind. The suggestion in it of toughness excited Jacob. As he looked into the face, he saw by the change in its shading that the mild and even twilight was, even as he watched, at last lapsing, and leaving exposed, as a tide might leave rocks and shells, the sharp and fragmented lights cast by street lamps and shop signs. After they had stared at each other hesitatingly for a few moments, not touching, proposed that they walk down to Café Slavia, which overlooked the Vltava, and Jacob agreed. They walked slowly and with uneven steps, not yet adjusted to each other’s gaits. They soon gave up on French and German. Luboš asked simple questions in Czech, and Jacob acted out words he didn’t know, which Luboš supplied as soon as he could identify them. When Jacob turned the same questions back on Luboš, Luboš then drew on this fresh vocabulary, as in a card game where you may take from another player’s discards. By this means, as they walked, Jacob made the commonplace revelations of a first date: that his parents had divorced when he was a child, that he had only come out a year and a half ago, that he did not have a boyfriend. For all the struggle required to communicate—though whether it was despite the struggle or because of it he could not have said—Jacob found that his own sense of his meanings burned clear and bright in his mind, unshadowed by the misstatements he threw off on his way to them. The misunderstandings were too numerous to stop for; they were only temporary. Luboš, however, was more cautious; when Jacob asked about his parents, for example, he answered only that he did have parents, he was fairly sure, and his smile stopped Jacob from asking more. He had always known he was gay.

  Just before they reached the river, they stepped to the right through two sets of glass double doors into Slavia. It was crowded and indifferent to them, but Luboš found a welcome by sharing a word with the cashier in a low and confidential tone. He then led Jacob down the long L of the café, past a fragile-looking upright piano jammed into its elbow, to a table littered with previous visitors’ plates and cups but otherwise abandoned. He had walked to it as if he had known it would be there. Through the wide windows that faced the embankment, they could see the violet, dying sky across the river, too weak now to cast any illumination. The café was lit by brass sconces of a timeless ugliness. The chairs were heavy and upholstered in a pinkish fabric. It was an ugliness that Jacob was beginning to recognize. There wasn’t anything like it in the West. The taste of the 1970s had been here an elaboration of that of the 1950s rather than a rebellion against it—the gaudiness and shapelessness had been made somehow to serve propriety instead of challenging it. Yet the mood of the people in the room seemed to defy the decor, or at least ignore it.

  —Your dissidents came here, Luboš said.

  “Is it a gay place?” Jacob asked, in English. Too late he wondered if the question might seem disrespectful.

  —No, Luboš answered. Jacob tried to take his hand, but he pulled away. —Not here, Kuba. Here is not yet America.

  Jacob didn’t take the refusal seriously, and after Luboš ordered a glass of white wine, and Jacob a Becherovka, a liqueur with a medicinal taste, like peppermint tea left to steep too long, he slid a foot forward under the table so that it lay just beside one of Luboš’s. In Boston, Daniel had informed Jacob that muscles were the currency of gay life, and that one worked to have them in order to be attractive to the men one wanted because they had them. Jacob, not having them but wanting Daniel anyway, had thus been a kind of poor relation. In Prague, however, no one seemed to have muscles of the American kind, and Jacob foresaw for himself a field of romantic opportunity that Daniel’s economics had priced out of his reach. He could see no reason for someone like Luboš, who liked him—Daniel, too, had liked him; that hadn’t been the problem—to stickle and resist him. If there was any resistance, he was going to push until he found out the reason for it.

  —Kuba, I called you three times, Luboš said.

  —T
hree?

  —Perhaps, boys are always calling you.

  Jacob took his French-Czech dictionary from his jacket pocket and pointed out the word for message.

  Luboš shook his head. —The man, with whom I spoke, wasn’t so polite. He said, that it’s not your phone.

  Jacob wanted to say that the Stehlíks had assured him that he was free to use the phone whenever he wanted, but he couldn’t figure out how to say it; his sentence broke down.

  —Did you want to see me? Luboš asked. He seemed to be playing on Jacob’s anxiety, which must have been evident in his face.

  —Yes, yes. He wanted to say that he liked Luboš, but it required some concentration, because in the transition from English grammar to Czech, the subject and object of the sentence switched places: —You are pleasing to me.

  The words sounded childlike.

  —And French is not pleasing to you, Jacob continued, changing the subject to one suggested by his dictionary.

  Luboš seemed to want to take this up but hesitated. Instead, more in pantomime than in words, he suggested they order a plate of , which Jacob knew to be small, stale slices of bread spread with lard and topped with diced vegetables and meats. It was already too late to find a table open at a proper restaurant, where, still governed by socialist principles, most waiters turned away guests who arrived after the first seating.

  It seemed grand to Jacob that he was sitting in a café in Prague with his Czech lover, forgoing dinner for the sake of whatever it was that was between them. He could smoke a few cigarettes to kill his hunger, if the didn’t accomplish that.

  “Or we can buy párky later,” Jacob said, in English, thinking out loud. A párek was a fat roasted pink sausage, sold on the streets at all hours.

  —And párky are pleasing to you, Kuba?

  Jacob was happy to play the straight man. —A great deal, he said.

  Upon the arrival of the waiter, Luboš asked him only to refill their drinks.

  * * *

  Jacob had arrived in Prague with a project. He couldn’t see that he was carrying it; to see that would have required standing a little farther outside himself than he was able to. He would have said it was a mood, if anyone had asked, or maybe a spirit, if he was writing in the privacy of his journal. But he wouldn’t have understood that it took the shape of a story he wanted to live out. It was a common enough project for an earnest, idealistic young person who was comfortable with only one pleasure, reading, and who had graduated from college in the year of the protest in Tiananmen Square, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution, so that his first personal experience of adult freedom—which he knew didn’t count for much in the grand scheme of things but which he felt with great intensity—seemed echoed by the wider world. Although he knew that he was hearing not echoes but emanations from distant sources, he wasn’t above thinking they might have a special resonance for him—that he might be receptive to them in a way others couldn’t be. He had a sense that everything in his life up to that point was prelude, which might safely be skipped by anyone who came late to the story, and the recent date of his discovery that he loved men strengthened this feeling; he thought that nothing finally attached him to the world that had formed him, and that this separation was what he had instead of a skill or a legacy; this was his special advantage. Without knowing it, he was looking for people who were heroic, so he could join them. It had to be without knowing it that he set out on this quest, because he did know that it was too late. Try as he might to acquire a memory of the revolution, he would find only souvenirs. He was on guard, paradoxically, against many of the same sentiments that drew him; nostalgia would be a kind of infidelity to the change whose essence he was trying to come close to. To break through the commemorative trinkets and partygoer’s clichés, it was vital that he learn Czech, from a Czech lover if possible. Even if it was too late to take part in the great change that had happened here, he anxiously hoped that it might not be so far gone that it could not be, in subtle traces it had left behind, witnessed.