Necessary Errors: A Novel (14 page)

Though it was tomorrow night’s date that was canceled, somehow the news left him feeling cut off from the world tonight, too; the evening ahead seemed long. He decided to try to call Luboš. The pub with the pay phone was across a concrete plaza from the mall of stores, in the direction from which he had just come.

The neighbor’s collie barked furiously. Jacob took a lunging sidestep toward it, because he felt a viciousness in himself tonight, as fierce as the dog’s, and the animal paused for a moment, frightened into silence. But Jacob kept walking, and the dog realized that the challenge was empty—that the fence remained between them—and renewed his barking with even more force.

At the pub, Jacob was told there was no phone. —Outside, a man advised him, and when Jacob walked back outside, he saw that he had walked right past the phone booth, a frail, slender structure with an orange-painted frame and sixteen panes of glass, most of them cracked. A narrow margin of grass had grown up around it, a little wildly, where the municipal lawnmower had evidently not been able to reach. The grass had died with the coming of the cold weather, at about the height of a child.

The apparatus inside was intact and took Jacob’s coin. The call went through; he heard the doubled buzzing that signaled that the phone was ringing in the house of Luboš’s friend. It rang for a long time. As he waited, he remembered a time when he was a boy and had called his best friend repeatedly, as an experiment, asking each time if his friend had picked up the phone on the ring or between rings, until the two of them
determined that there was no connection between the ringing sound heard by the caller and the actual rings of the phone called.

—Please, a voice answered, a standard but to Jacob’s ears somewhat officious way to answer the phone in Czech.

—Good evening. Is Luboš there?

—Who’s calling?

—Jacob.

—One moment.

There was scuffling and scratching as the receiver was set down. In a short while the voice returned, now speaking English: “He is away. May I take message?”

—I will call later, Jacob answered, insisting on Czech.

“Do you have telephone?”

—No longer, Jacob said. —I will call again.

The booth’s glass gave some shelter from the wind, and Jacob lingered there after replacing the receiver. And suddenly it was all too much for him. He felt sad and misplaced, with the abrupt, overwhelming, dizzying sadness that comes over people in countries not their own, which has none of the richness of feeling that usually comes with sadness but is rather a kind of exhaustion. It hardly mattered about Luboš, he felt. It wasn’t really Luboš that he missed; it was still Daniel, as it had been before, as perhaps it would always be. As he thought of Daniel, the feelings and circumstances of Boston returned to him with unexpected intensity. He didn’t enjoy remembering them, but they seemed more powerful than he was, and more real than his surroundings. They seemed to establish a context for themselves in the night around him more solid than the rickety booth that he was, rather pointlessly, still standing in. He felt lightheaded, as if he were a little drunk. And like a drunk he became maudlin. That a person like Daniel had taken him up, however briefly, was the only remarkable thing that had ever happened to him. It was stupid of him to be here, so far away.

He would call Daniel. He took his calling card out of his wallet, put another crown in the phone, and dialed his American telephone company’s access number for Czechoslovakia. Since the machine had a rotary dial, he had to say aloud to the operator both his calling card number and Daniel’s number, which he still knew by heart. The phone rang, and his throat tightened, as it always did when he called Daniel,
for fear of saying the wrong thing. It would be lunchtime there. He would have to disguise the impulse of the call, he thought hurriedly, because if Daniel knew it, he would express disappointment. But he wanted to confess his impulse and to have Daniel be kind to him for once.

Daniel’s machine answered. Jacob left a plain message, in the hope that Daniel might be home, hear his voice, and pick up, but he didn’t pick up. Jacob finished speaking and was left alone again. The night was putting a chill on him. The same sorrow began to well up in him, but he choked it off, became angry at Daniel for having once more failed him. The familiarity of the anger was a consolation; it was enough of one, at any rate, to carry him back to his rooms, where he was able to make a dinner—some fried sausage, a spoonful of red cabbage from a jar, a peeled carrot, and two toasted and buttered slices of brown caraway-seed bread—and recover some of his strength.

Until bedtime he read Stendhal. He had put it aside when he began to try to learn Czech in earnest, because it was too much of an effort to read a book in one foreign language at the end of a day spent learning another, but now, beside the medieval travelogue he had forced himself to choose at the Clementinum, it seemed the lesser of two evils, and the effort it required helped to abstract him.

He fell asleep with difficulty and awoke a few hours later into an unpleasant and complete alertness. His sleeping mind had somehow stumbled onto the thought that it was possible for him to die here. He wasn’t thinking of any specific threat; it was almost a mathematical sort of realization—the longer he stayed, the higher the odds of dying here—but he wanted to die at home. It frightened him a little to discover he had such a strong opinion about where he wanted to die, and since he was alone, he decided there would be no embarrassment—he wouldn’t be burdening any witnesses with it; there was no Daniel present to construe it as an appeal—in letting himself cry openly.

After a few minutes of this he began to feel better. He got up to wash his face and pour himself a glass of water. Because the feelings in the last few hours had been so potent and their shifts so sudden, it occurred to him to write a short story about them. After all, his development as a writer was the justification he gave himself for staying abroad, and he’d written almost nothing so far. He took a pen and paper
and made some notes. He decided to imagine that he had reached Daniel on the telephone. Perhaps the Daniel of the story would feel a little guilty, would worry that his hardness of heart had set Jacob wandering. No, that was implausible; Daniel was beyond guilt. After Jacob had spent the night with him, Daniel had told the story to his boyfriend as an amusement rather than as a confession. Jacob yawned; the anxiety that had awoken him was receding. Perhaps the Daniel of the story could be different, though, more like the Daniel who sometimes surprised him. He had so many thoughts about Daniel, and it had been so long since he had allowed himself to think them. His emotions hadn’t really been engaged here in Prague, only distracted, he said to himself; it had not actually been life. As he set down his pen and returned to bed, he decided he would go with Annie to Berlin.

*   *   *

It was late morning when they settled into their train compartment, and they collapsed at once into the pleasant, premature fatigue that follows a successful morning departure, especially one achieved with only minutes to spare—by the time they had reached the train station, they had been cheerfully shouting at each other to hurry—and that serves as a kind of blanket to protect the traveler from the strangeness and emptiness that follow.

They had the compartment to themselves. Once outside Prague, they saw that a light frost lay on the ground, not on the exposed clay of the railroad embankment itself but on the grasses that rolled away from it. The modernity of the city had stopped abruptly at its border; the train was carrying them through pastures, farmlands, and occasionally a village—a few boxy white stucco houses and a rusty car in the crook of a hill’s elbow. The steady, muffled clatter of the train reassured and calmed them. “Kontroll bíjety,” a boyish conductor announced, in European pidgin, as he slid open their compartment door on its rattling casters and propped it open, somewhat rakishly, with one foot.

“Prosím,” Annie said, surrendering her ticket, and asked Jacob, aside, “Do they think we’re German now?”

“I do not think, that you are German,” the conductor interposed.

“Sorry, I had no idea you spoke English. How rude of me.”

“Not at all, madam.” He tipped his hat and was gone.

They decided to eat the lunches they had packed, though it was still a little early. Annie had brought a thermos of coffee, hot, and another of
milk, cold, and an extra cup for Jacob. She also had oranges, a salad of cucumber and tomatoes, and a tin of sardines. Jacob, who abstained from the sardines, had brought a soft cheese, a salami that
had recommended one day when their paths crossed at the butcher’s, and half a loaf of bread, as well as a knife to cut them with, wrapped for safety in his towel, since the knife didn’t fold. For dessert he had brought two small plastic pots of
smetanový krém
, a sort of sweetened crème fraîche.

“We’d have had to eat soon anyway,” Jacob rationalized, “because the
krém
wouldn’t have stayed cold.”

“You know it’s for children, Jacob. I mean, with ladybirds and butterflies and such like on the packages.”

They dozed; they read. At the border the train stopped for half an hour while two teams of border guards, first larkish Czechs and then impassive Germans, inspected passports. As the train drifted into motion again, Jacob sat up to see if the landscape would change, and it did: now all the roofs of the little houses were red, as if by regulation. The trees were more neatly trimmed and even, in places, pollarded. Cars, when he saw them, were brightly polished. By a subtle change, the hills, which were steeper, and the villages, which were even more ingeniously placed, now looked strangely familiar to Jacob, who recalled that his great-grandfather had immigrated to Texas from Germany and that his grandmother knew German because it had been spoken in her childhood home. He wondered if it was here that he ought to have come in the first place.

Annie interrupted his reverie. “Is your heart set on Berlin, then?”

“I thought yours was.”

She leaned toward the window for a better view, tugging the gray-green curtain out of her way with a quick hand, and her face was lit up by a reflection from a field of uncut straw. “It’s just that it’s something of a challenge to go back to a place sometimes. I wish you would come tonight after all.” They had discussed this. She had a plan to meet some of her old friends, and Jacob had decided to explore Berlin’s gay nightlife. “Instead of foraging.”

“Foraging?”

“Pillaging. Whatever it is that you do. But you need to make up your mind too, I suppose.”

“You could come with me.”

“No, I would have to face them eventually if I moved here. I’ll go by myself. I only asked the ones I want to see.”

They fell silent. Annie slipped off her shoes and pulled her feet up beside her on the banquette. The train slowed but did not stop for a small station house in yellow stone with a mansard roof and bricked-up windows.

“You know, in some ways I find it’s much better in Prague than it was for me in Berlin. It’s more steady, with the group that we have.”

“We don’t
have
to move.”

When they alighted at Berlin Lichtenberg, they quarreled, because Annie wanted to board an elevated train just pulling in upstairs, and Jacob, feeling cautious, insisted on standing in front of the grand transit map of the city posted beside the ticket booth and puzzling out their route. According to the map, more than one elevated train passed through the station, as well as an underground train. But that was as much as Jacob could figure out. Before leaving Prague, he had memorized the name of the stop nearest the tourist bureau where they hoped to reserve inexpensive rooms, and he couldn’t find it anywhere on the map.

“I don’t understand.”

“How peculiar,” Annie agreed, after he had asked her to help him search and she too had failed.

They felt rising in them the slow panic that hunger for dinner brings in travelers who don’t yet know where they are going to sleep. A German man, as if sensing their anxiety, came forward offering “Zimmer, zimmer,” but they waved him away. It was a gray, cheerless station; the floors were dusty and the paint was peeling off the walls. Jacob marched them outside, over Annie’s protests, in search of a street sign so that he could locate them on a map of the two Berlins that he had bought in Prague. The burden of their luggage aggravated their sense of unease and vulnerability. The street name they found wasn’t listed in the index of Jacob’s map.

“I’m not going any farther, Jacob. Shall we go back inside and ask at the ticket window?”

The ticket seller took money from them and pointed to the track where Annie had wanted to board the elevated in the first place.

“I told you.”

“I thought people would speak English here,” Jacob said.

“Oh, they do, in Berlin. But this is East Berlin, and very much so, in my opinion.”

Inside the elevated train, a new transit map explained the mystery: Before unification, the transit systems of East and West Berlin had intersected at only one station. Only that station had appeared on the maps of both cities; there had been no need to remind riders of the existence of places they could not visit. In the new map, the two webs now touched along one filament, hesitantly, and Jacob was able to see both the station where they had boarded and the one near the tourist bureau. He saw, too, that the map that he’d bought in Prague had been no help because it didn’t really show both cities; it showed only as much of East Berlin as was unavoidably included by a rectangle large enough to contain all of West Berlin. It was merely an old map of West Berlin that had been opportunistically relabeled.