Necessary Errors: A Novel (15 page)

The eastern city lay below, in white, cold, massive buildings that turned away from them like the spokes of a great turbine as the elevated train took a curve. The architecture looked as grand and sober as cemetery marble.

“There’s no one about, is there,” Annie remarked. “But then it’s midday in winter. You know, we could have stayed in East Berlin. It would have been less dear.”

“Absolutely not.”

“You sometimes give the impression that you don’t much care for socialism, Jacob.”

The western city now wheeled toward them, and they saw that it was crawling with traffic and spotted with advertising. The quiet in the car around them became fragile, like an egg to be cracked.

“Gah, it’s wonderful,” said Annie.

They descended into the hum of the city in a sort of intoxication.

*   *   *

That night found Jacob sitting in a Kreuzberg café, reading.

“With his book he is like Alice,” said a man nearby. He spoke in English so Jacob would take notice.

“Alice didn’t have a book,” Jacob protested, and shut John Mandeville.

“No, didn’t she? In the underground?” The man and a friend of his laughed.

“But you know where you are, don’t you,” said a third man. He was lanky, with pale skin, a large nose, and fine, sandy hair. Like the others, he was in his thirties. “Don’t listen to these silly old queens.”

“What have you called us? You are too bad.”

“He is for me. I spoke to him the first.”

“But he doesn’t want you,” the sandy-haired man again intervened. “Am I right?”

“He’s not the one I would choose,” Jacob answered. At this the two silly ones laughed even more.

When it was late enough, the sandy-haired man, who said his name was Markus, left the café with Jacob and took him to a club in the top floor of a factory building, a loft space with cement floors and ceiling-high, many-paned windows. The room was dark, loud, full, and hot, and the lights of the city glittered outside, a low-hanging constellation that Jacob already felt he was coming to know.

“This is the great place to come now, if you are gay,” Markus said. “You see I am showing you the sights.” He seemed to be making fun of his own generosity. He was careful not to make any claim on Jacob, not to expect any return for his courtesy.

Jacob looked over the other men in the club with open hunger and curiosity. It seemed a place to be unabashed. He didn’t know if he wanted Markus or one of the others.

“How is it you speak such pretty German?”

“I speak absurd German. You’re not even pretending to speak German to me.”

“But your pronunciation is beautiful.”

“And how about your English.”

“I spent a year in America. And I am an actor. It is my job to learn accents.”

“I would never learn German if I moved here. Everyone speaks perfect English.”

The conversation was only a pretext for studying each other’s eyes. Jacob felt lightheaded. He had decided an hour ago that he couldn’t afford to spend any more deutschmarks on beer, but Markus had continued to buy beers for both of them. There was a lovely sense of being
cut off, unrecognized. In Boston some of the clubs had tried to offer this impersonality but hadn’t managed it.

Overhead lights flickered on and off. “It is closing soon,” Markus explained. “Now is what I call tiger time. The great beasts pad about, eyeing one another, trying to make up their minds at last.”

To Jacob it seemed as if Markus had given voice to the small indifference that still kept them apart, and it made him want to end it. He pulled Markus toward him and they began to kiss. There was no clumsiness, as there was with Luboš.

“Let’s go to my place,” Markus suggested. Jacob became aware that they were standing in the center of the room and that the lights were on steadily now, but he saw in Markus’s expression that his suggestion came not from embarrassment but eagerness.

*   *   *

The sun came in heavily through the curtainless windows and woke Jacob. Markus was stepping into trousers. “Forgive me, I must go to work.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Would you like tea? Lemon? Honey?”

“Sure,” Jacob answered. Markus was unbuttoning a shirt in order to put it on. “What is this?” Jacob asked, lightly touching a painted circle under Markus’s skin in the small of his back.

“It’s a mantra. Do you know what that is? It’s a saying that you repeat during meditation.”

Jacob had known the word but didn’t mind being given a lesson. “How does it go?”

Markus uttered the syllables.

“And what does it mean?”

“‘The lotus rises from the swamp,’” Markus said quickly, as if he would rather not have said it.

“I’m sorry. Is it a secret?”

Markus laughed. “No, no.”

The sun washed the wood of the floors almost white. Jacob pulled sheets around him for cover; the apartment was only a few stories up from the street and the mattress was higher than Jacob was used to, as if atop a pedestal, because it had been placed above a sort of bureau-wardrobe in order to economize floor space. Beside a desk stood a small bookcase of
plays in German and English, and Jacob began to read the titles. It was a real home. It was as if Jacob had been given a passkey to the inside of life in Berlin, as if he had been accepted into a kind of freemasonry.

“Here you are.” Markus carefully handed up a tea tray. When Jacob took it, in his unsteady hands, the cup rattled loudly in the saucer until he set it on the bed beside him. “You may stay as long as you like; the door will lock by itself behind you. There is a towel in the shower, and here is my phone number.”

“I don’t have a phone number myself, or I would give it to you.”

“You are traveling.”

“Maybe I can see you again before I go back?”

“Excellent,” Markus answered, but he did not suggest a plan, as if he feared Jacob, as his guest, might be speaking only out of politeness. “And please, here is for a taxi. Czech crowns do not go very far, and I have brought you to a different part of town from where I found you.”

Jacob scarcely remembered having told Markus that he was living in Prague. “No, please, that’s not necessary,” Jacob said weakly. In fact he had no idea where he was, and with the money in sight, he felt a little greed for it and didn’t see why he shouldn’t take it.

Markus saw his hesitation. “Yes, take it; don’t be ridiculous.”

They said good-bye, not tenderly, but as if their parting might break into another round of activity. Left alone, Jacob climbed back into bed and dozed, enjoying his nakedness, which was novel to him, because he never slept naked in his own bed. He remembered the tea. Annie would have a good idea where he was, but he shouldn’t keep her waiting. He took a leisurely shower.

Before leaving, he stepped into the living room, because he hadn’t seen it yet. Its formality reminded him that he hadn’t been invited into it, so he looked no more than hurriedly at the leather armchair, Bokhara rug, glass coffee table. In a painting, placed on a wall the sun wouldn’t hit, was a tangle of reds and oranges. It called forth no response in Jacob; he felt only that he shouldn’t be looking at it, that he was loitering. A neighbor would look through a window and think a thief had got into the apartment.

*   *   *

When the taxi came, it was a German car that in America would have been considered a luxury model. It was clean, and no barrier separated
the front and back seats. The young driver asked if Jacob would like to hear music; a Mendelssohn song without words was playing softly on the radio. When Jacob agreed, the driver turned it up. Jacob felt that he had slipped somehow into an atmosphere of solidity and consideration that he couldn’t have purchased in Prague and that he couldn’t have afforded even if it were for sale there—that he probably couldn’t have afforded even in America—yet he and the atmosphere seemed to recognize each other. He fell into it comfortably; he somehow felt it was due him. He knew he would step out of it when the taxi put him down at the door of the hostel. In America it was the privilege of a life he had decided he didn’t want, of deferments and compromises, but he hadn’t quite faced up to the idea of going without it always, and he had been hoping to leave the question behind when he left America, along with the question he faced in bars. Markus made his living as an actor. No, Jacob corrected himself, he hadn’t said that; he had only said he was an actor. Jacob didn’t know for certain that it was to a theater that Markus had had to go so punctually on a Friday morning.

After the morning sun, the upstairs hallway of the hostel seemed dim and its air stale, like an invalid’s room. Jacob’s footfalls were involuntarily quieted by the carpet. He didn’t think Annie would still be asleep, and he knocked on her door, which he came to before his own.

“Hello? Who’s there?” he heard her ask from within, in a timid voice. He would have pictured an old woman if he hadn’t known her.

“It’s me. It’s Jacob.”

He heard the deadbolt thrown, and the doorknob turned, but she didn’t unlatch the small chain at eye level until she saw him. “Jeez, you frightened me. I didn’t know who it was.”

“Who did you think?”

She wandered back into the small room, searching among her unpacked clothes and makeup and open, facedown books and the washed-out containers from their train-board lunch for the ashtray where she had set her cigarette. “I had no idea, really. You weren’t in when I knocked a short while ago, so I didn’t think it could be you.”

“I’m just getting in.”

“So I gather.” She bounced gently down on the bed beside her suitcase and squinted at him through the smoke. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, I can see that you are, now.”

He wanted to tell her about it, but she wanted breakfast first. They found a place on the next street and ordered eggs and tea. He narrated his adventure while they ate.

“How much is it in crowns, do you think?” Annie asked when the bill came.

Jacob had to figure it into dollars first, before he could answer. It was about three days’ salary.

“It’s on me,” he volunteered. “I happen to have the deutschmarks.”

“You’ll need them soon enough. Aren’t you going to buy a pair of blue jeans?”

“They aren’t my deutschmarks. Markus gave them to me for cab fare, and I didn’t use them all.”

“Well, I won’t stop you if you want to disembarrass yourself of them.”

“There’s only change left,” Jacob assured her, and showed it to her in his palm.

She hadn’t finished her tea, and they were both reluctant to start the business part of their day, asking for work in language schools, so they sat a little longer.

“Are you still seeing your Czech friend?” Annie asked, to make conversation.

“He stood me up the other day.”

“Oh?” She clinked a spoon idly in her cup. “Perhaps he’s a little afraid of you.”

“No, no.”

“You needn’t become alarmed. I’m not saying he’s afraid of anything you might do.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, more quietly, thinking she meant he was an outsider, who would eventually leave. “You haven’t told me anything about
your
evening,” he continued, to change the subject.

“Oh, haven’t I?” she said. “It was fine, as you Americans say. ‘Fine.’”

“That’s good,” Jacob responded, but he was not so inattentive as to believe her. “Where should we go first?” he asked. “There are a couple of language schools over on the Ku’damm.”

“Oh, are there?” she echoed, uncertainly. Jacob had noticed the addresses on billboards the night before, on his way to Kreuzberg. They
hadn’t otherwise prepared at all. In Prague Jacob hadn’t needed to. On his third day in the city, frustrated by a broken pay phone on the street, he had stepped into an office building to ask where he could find a phone that worked. The building’s porter had listened to him ask his question in English and in French, and had then directed him by gestures to the third floor, where, instead of a pay phone, Jacob had found the municipal office for foreign language instruction. The porter had thought Jacob had known where he was. Within an hour, he had signed a contract for a year’s employment.

“I don’t know as I’m up for it, Jacob, I’m sorry,” Annie said.

“We have to try, at least,” he insisted, thinking with confidence how easy it had been in Prague. “Today’s our only weekday. The worst they can do is say no, and if they do we’ll just ask which of their competitors has low standards and might take us.”

“It isn’t that.” She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, I’m a right eejit.”

Now she was crying but working to stop herself. “What is an eejit, anyway,” he asked. “Is it like a git?”

“You know, an eejit. A person who does a thing everyone knows he shouldn’t do, but everyone knows he will do, anyway.” In the act of explaining, her composure began to come back to her.

“Like an idiot.”

“It’s not as cold as that.” He waited; she drank a little of her tea. “So I went to the bar, to meet my friends,” she continued. “And there was this man, whom I used to be with. I didn’t think he’d be there, or I wouldn’t have gone. An awfully fine man. He was on the stuff, we all were, a little, when I was here before. Which made it rather carefree.”

“And you had some last night.”

“What do you take me for, Jacob? I may be an eejit, but I’m not bloody stupid.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t,” she said. “But that’s just it, as it happens. If I came back, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t, in the end. Which would spoil it. The memory isn’t all bad, you see. But it’s the having left that keeps it from being all bad, if you understand what I’m saying.”

She seemed fragile and brave. “Let’s not move to Berlin, then,” he said. “It was you who brought me here.”

“I didn’t see my way, then.”

“It’s okay,” he said. But he wondered if he really could give up what he had caught a glimpse of.

“You haven’t fallen in love, have you.”

“No, no,” he said. “I wanted to see, is all.”

He continued for a while to assure her that he didn’t want to stay, but in the end they decided he might as well take a look at the language schools. There was no harm in his exploration.