Necessary Errors: A Novel (27 page)

—No, it wasn’t. And for that reason we laughed. Be very pretty, Kuba, and buy me one whiskey. Here you have money.

—Keep your money, I will buy it, Jacob offered.

—Are you sure? It costs twenty-seven crowns.

—That is expensive, Jacob admitted, and took Ota’s money after all.

—So I thought.

The German, seeing the money passed, added money of his own to the table, and indicated by pantomime that he, too, wanted a whiskey and that he would pay for both his and Ota’s. —Is it possible to pay with deutschmarks here? Jacob asked, hesitating to pick up the German bills.

—Of course, Ota said. —Here as everywhere.

The press of men at the bar was thick, but Jacob was approached by Pavel before he got far into it. It seemed crass to pay with foreign currency, but Pavel showed no surprise. To confirm the order, Pavel told him the name of the American whiskey the bar served. Before he could return, Ota appeared at Jacob’s elbow.

—The whiskeys are coming, Jacob assured him.

“I will wait with you,” Ota said in English. “I have question. I have
a
question, excuse me. Do you like George?”

“George?”

“
. The pretty one. The dark one.”

“Oh. He’s very handsome.”

“Do you want him? He is wishing for you, but you must say now.”

“Why now?”

“You must,” Ota said with simple impatience. “He is, how to say, like a fruit.”

“Ripe.”

“Yes, he is ripe.”

“I don’t know,” Jacob said, deliberating.

“As you like it,” Ota answered. The indifference in his voice seemed unfeigned; it was only as a favor to the young man that he had asked.

“I wasn’t really looking, tonight,” Jacob continued, though Ota was hardly listening. There was an attraction, and Jacob was young enough that it was little trouble to make up the difference between his wishes and an opportunity. But he wasn’t sure.

Ota circled back to his table, and Jacob continued to worry the question alone. It was a relief when Pavel brought the whiskeys.

The negotiations with himself turned out to be pointless. At Ota’s table, he found the young man kissing the German, who bent over the seated youth from behind and slipped a hand between the buttons of his shirt. When the kiss ended, the youth’s eyes followed the German’s departing
lips with a false look of adoration and then passed to the whiskeys that Jacob was setting on the table before him. Ota took one. The youth took the other, and the German did not resent the appropriation. Perhaps the German had all along intended to buy it for the boy.

“Schuss,” said the boy, raising his glass to Ota. He made no effort to meet Jacob’s eyes.

The German took out his pocketbook and gestured to Jacob to buy a whiskey to replace the one the boy was drinking.

“Get it yourself,” Jacob said in English.

Ota intercepted the cash and passed it to another of his followers. Jacob sat glaring. It was only his vanity, at first, that was injured. The German was so plain, dry, and small. The German had a complacency of manner—was that the attraction? To Jacob it was even more disgusting than his looks. The man seemed to consider it natural that the youth had chosen him. He seemed in fact ignorant that any other choice had been possible; he was as perfectly indifferent to Jacob as Ivan had been half an hour before.

The boy sent to the bar by Ota, a blond—his name was Milo, Jacob remembered—returned with the German’s new whiskey. The German stroked the boy’s hand as he took it. The boy flinched and a few drops spilled in the transfer; the German took no notice. And in trying to understand this interaction, Jacob assembled a new picture of what he was looking at. You fucking idiot, he said to himself.

—Ota, may I talk with you?

—Gladly.

—We two apart, Jacob specified.

—With you, of course.

They took a table at the edge of the room, where the shadows seemed to make an arcade. The men who were seated nearby, the sort who came to T-Club primarily to drink, did them the courtesy of pretending not to take an interest.

It was difficult to begin. Jacob felt he had been treated like a child. Ota sat expectantly forward and seemed to be trying to shade with heavy lids the brightness of his eyes. —You must pardon, Jacob said, more gently than he intended. —I do not know how to ask fittingly.

—That isn’t a bother, Ota replied. His eyes stayed on Jacob’s, while
the rest of him shifted in the unaccustomed chair, and then his eyes too wavered.

—Are you a whore, Ota? Jacob asked. He hadn’t been able to think of a politer word.

Ota set down his whiskey and covered his face with his hands. The spindly fingers came together like slats of wood fitted to one another and made a blind. Jacob looked down into his drink.

“You must understand,” Ota said, choosing to speak in English; perhaps it felt less real to him. “It is a good time to know languages.”

“I see.” Jacob felt blood rising into his face.

“If you say hello, if you smile.”

“I see.”

“Ach, Kuba. You look, you seem to say—.” His voice cracked like a boy’s, and he started gasping. “When you first come, I think so many things. I think, we shall be friends, Jacob and I.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jacob, alarmed.

“No, no. Is all right.” He stopped himself. “It will not be. That is all.” He pushed at his eyes with his thin fingers. “It is only that I think that it will go one way, and it goes all the time another.”

—But why this, Ota? he asked in Czech. —Why did you—?

—You do not understand. It is so much money. It is only money, but there is so much. We are only boys, Kuba.

Jacob nodded. He found that he wanted to hear that it was out of Ota’s power.

—My father, he does not make so much in one month. He does not speak to me, he is shit, and in one hour, I…He hates me anyway. So then why not?

While making this speech, Ota sank back gradually in his chair, until he regarded Jacob from a posture of sullen challenge. In the course of a few sentences Jacob seemed to have changed in Ota’s eyes from a fairy prince into a disapproving father.

—But don’t be angry, Ota continued, as if what he saw in Jacob were changing again.

It occurred to Jacob that his hand on Ota’s might console him, but he could not bring himself to place it there. —I’m not angry, Jacob said. —I’m only sorry.

They remained in place, and Ota’s grief and protests rose and fell for
a while, like a patient whose painkiller is slow to take effect. It began to seem to be a performance.

—Now you will never like me, Ota murmured. He seemed to be both in earnest and play-acting.

—Ota, Ota, Jacob said. Ota didn’t seem to recognize that he had given anything up.

—But tell me, Jacob resumed. —You also arrange?

—That is only for friends, Ota said quickly.

—I understand, Jacob said, but he no longer knew whether he believed him. —And tell me, Jacob continued. —Because now I must know everything.

—And I will tell you everything.

—Why did Ivan keep me out?

—He wanted, for you to pay him.

—But I didn’t pay, and nevertheless then for a while he let me in.

—I don’t know. You never spent any dollars, and you were with us so often, maybe he thought, that you were trying to earn some. But you never paid him for that, either.

—I confused him.

Ota shrugged. —He is an old Communist. He only understands money. Then, as if recalled by the mention of Ivan to the thought of what he owed to this world, he added: —But he’s not so bad. It’s his system.

—Not that, Jacob said. —Don’t tell me, that he’s not so bad.

—As you wish, Ota said. With his handkerchief he began to repair his appearance. —I am feeble, he reproached himself.

—I still have your cassette, Jacob said.

—It’s not a hurry.

—I must return it. It’s already a month.

—Bring it to T-Club the next time.

—No, elsewhere, Jacob said. —Of this place I have had enough.

Ota laughed. —I too, I too.

They made an appointment to meet at two the next afternoon in a Wenceslas snack bar, which, Jacob discovered when he got home, was described in his gay travel guide as a good spot to pick up hustlers. The next day Jacob waited there an hour. Under glass in a long case were two plates of
topinky
—appetizer toasts—stale and yellow. Jacob ordered a
coffee but it was too sour to drink, even with sugar. Ota did not show up, and Jacob never saw him again.

*   *   *

He allowed himself a certain blankness in his thoughts. Ota had only spoken about himself, after all. Nonetheless, on Sunday morning, while a low fog was haunting the streets, Jacob walked to the phone booth beside the pub to call Luboš.

He took off one glove to dial the number and then with his bare hand touched one of the booth’s few uncracked panes of glass and watched a mist appear between his fingers. The spots of mist weakened and erased themselves when he took his hand away.

For once Luboš himself answered. —I want to talk with you, at least, Jacob said.

There was a pause. —Ota told me, that now you know.

—Yes, Jacob answered. In fact, until that moment, he hadn’t been sure about Luboš. The telephone made it possible for him to hide the fact of the revelation.

—A rendezvous at
? Luboš proposed.

—Yes, Jacob agreed.

Between their conversation and their appointment, the fog did not lift. Night, however, fell, and when Jacob emerged from the
subway station, the fog was making halos around the lamps of Wenceslas Square, fine, white dandelions of light, and the bright stones of the pavement, closer to him than any of the buildings and therefore, in the cloudy air, less obscure, seemed to give by their reflection an upward glow, like footlights. Jacob knew before he could see his features that Luboš was the dark figure standing just past the bookshop, in front of a bank that never seemed to open. He was wearing a tan windbreaker; he was shivering and his hands were in the pockets of his jeans for warmth. Before he could take them out, Jacob kissed him.

—Tonight it can’t be seen, Jacob assured him.

—By good fortune, Luboš said, in reproach. He pretended to look around them for observers, but the gesture had an air of courtesy, of keeping up an old form. —To Slavia? Luboš suggested.

They walked past the sweetshop with glass walls, the balcony where Havel had declared the republic, and the gallery where the two of them had seen the exhibit of children’s book illustrations. Then they walked
down
as so often before. They walked past an antiques store where Jacob had once bought magic lantern slides of St. Vitus Cathedral and past the former offices of the Cuban cultural center, indefinitely shuttered. It had now been more than a year since the change, but everything was still in its old place. In a row there were a pharmacy, a stationer, an optician, and a travel agency, each labeled as such in the governmental lower case. A couple of months ago, on a street just parallel to this one, behind these smoke-gray Haussmann-like buildings, Jacob had been photographed for his residency permit in offices that had until very recently housed the secret police.