Necessary Errors: A Novel (34 page)

While Jacob cooked lentil soup and Irish soda bread, his own favorite of the few meals he knew how to prepare, and one of the most elaborate, he and Carl talked. By walking through Jacob’s rooms with his American eyes, Carl desanctified them. He broke their strangeness and their quiet, but Jacob felt content to lose his hours of solitude when he heard Carl tease him for having let melted candlewax ruin the folkloric integrity of the tablecloth, admire the cement wall out their bedroom windows, and confess, as he paused in the kitchen after a shower, wrapped in a towel, that the whoosh of the gas water heater in the bathroom had terrified him. “Are there any numbers, do you know, for the annual deaths in Czechoslovakia from fires caused by water heaters? That thing is dangerous, man.”

“I kind of enjoy it. It wakes me up in the morning.”

“You have short hair already.”

During the exchange, Jacob kept his eyes on the soup. He wanted Carl to feel that he could trust him. But Carl must have noticed the effort; the intimacy was never repeated.

They ate dinner with the hamster’s cage in the center of the table.

“He won’t think he’s going to be an hors d’oeuvre?”

“He was my company until you came. I don’t want to displace him right away.”

“Of course not.” Carl’s hair was still wet from his shower. “Is he eating because we’re eating?”

“I put that carrot in there just now.”

“Oh, I thought maybe it was sympathy eating. But it’s opportunity eating. This is really good by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re so set up here. You’ve got Václav. You’ve got a pantry. You’ve got a fucking pantry, man.”

“I love my pantry.”

“As you should.”

“Our pantry, now.”

“That’s big of you.”

“I’ve developed Depression-era habits,” Jacob boasted. “I always buy at least one extra bag of rice. At least one extra bag of sugar. There are shortages. You’ll see.”

“What are the boxes?”

“Dumpling powder.”

“Dumpling powder. Excellent.”

*   *   *

In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education. In Rome someone like Jacob wasn’t likely to distinguish sharply between the education he received in sculpture and the pleasure he took in the nudes depicted—in the beauty of the slaves and prostitutes who had modeled for the sculptors centuries before. So in Prague, Jacob wasn’t sure whether he valued the city’s buildings for their forms or merely as an opportunity for a kind of aestheticized history. The buildings interested him mostly as shadows cast by the way the Czechs had seen the world, or had wanted to see it, at different moments.

Their first morning together, Jacob took Carl to the foot of Wenceslas Square. They started at
shoe store, with the spare, rectilinear modernism of the First Republic. At Havelská, Jacob pointed out the shadowy arcade at the foot of the building where Mel and Rafe lived, so that Carl could admire the graceful curves of its Gothic arches. Fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He hoped that Carl could appreciate the simple things and not just the eye-catchers. He didn’t think Carl would mock his way of looking at buildings, which was part of his project of trying to come close to the revolution; Carl’s irony was too gentle. But he worried that Carl’s companionship might distract him from it, and so he was on the lookout for signs in Carl of a fellow seeker.

It was Jacob, however, who first strayed from art to commerce that morning. “This is new,” he said. “This building was shut before.”

“What is it, crystal?” Carl replied. “That’s a thing, isn’t it, Bohemian crystal. The sort of thing my mom would know about.”

“Do you mind if we go in?”

Jacob had visited several state-run crystal shops in the past. They had been cluttered with vases and goblets that were for the most part identical except in size and occasionally color. This shop, in contrast, was set up like a Western boutique. A ginger-tinted bowl, in the shape of a turban that had been doffed intact, had been given a shelf of its own in a window. Translucent pink and green sand dollars lay in a display box widely spaced apart, as if in a museum. The sand dollars were probably ashtrays; Jacob remembered that he hated expensive ashtrays on principle; then he also remembered that he ordinarily had no interest in crystal.

“This is one of the new stores.” He was speaking to Carl, but he was trying to explain his interest to himself. “Private retail only became legal a few weeks ago.”

Carl nodded politely. “Isn’t Mozart’s opera house around here?”

“Oh, sorry. You didn’t come to see this, did you.”

“I came to see everything.”

“I don’t remember an opera house,” Jacob said once they were outside again.

“‘The site of the world premiere of
Don Giovanni
,’” Carl quoted from a guidebook he had brought with him.

Across a narrow, cobblestoned pass stood a closed church. Jacob knew from habit and a general sense of direction that their next turn should be to the left, but Carl walked right, following a map in his guidebook. He was heading toward an alley with empty storefronts—into a kind of nothingness that one found throughout Prague, that one stumbled on in corners; Jacob had learned to avoid it. He had trained himself not even to see it, for the most part. The alley led back to
, where they had just been.

“There’s nothing here,” Jacob said. He shivered. He put up the hood of his coat, which blinkered his sight like a horse’s, and focused on Carl. “It isn’t here,” he repeated.

“I think it has to be. Is that it?”

Carl pointed at a hoarding that Jacob must have stopped noticing some time ago. It was unlabeled, except to forbid entry.

“You’re not allowed to go over there.”

“Well, I can go up to it, can’t I?”

“People don’t.”

The cobbled pass was so narrow and the hoarding so tall that from a distance they couldn’t see more than a slice of white building behind the plywood, and close up, the angles made it impossible to see anything but the hoarding itself. Its brown paint had puckered where water had got underneath, and a wire fence had been built in front of and against it, as if to hold it up.

“I think this is it,” Carl suggested. “Behind here.” He paced the length of the hoarding, in search of a seam through which to glimpse the building. “I don’t know if it’s right behind. It might be behind behind.”

“There are a lot of buildings that are open,” Jacob said. “Quite beautiful buildings.”

Carl didn’t take the hint. “Do you know the opera?”

“The opera house?”

“No, the opera.”

“No,” Jacob confessed.

“You should listen to it sometime,” Carl said softly. In Boston it had been part of Carl’s chic, Jacob remembered, to like works of art that a sophisticated uncle might have been enthusiastic about. In Boston he had introduced Jacob to Astrud Gilberto and to Auden. “The list. The lover versus the father. Versus death.”

“I saw the Miloš Forman movie.”

“There you go.” While remembering the music, Carl seemed to be seeing something other than the cold, gray street they stood in, and Jacob felt envious. “Should we climb over?” Carl asked.

“No,” Jacob answered with alarm.

“If you fold your hands and make a kind of stirrup…”

“No. I don’t want to get arrested.”

“They’re not going to arrest us. We’re Americans. They love us.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“It’s good for
us
. That’s why the Stehlíks rent to us, isn’t it?”

“They get money.”

“But they don’t need money. Everything’s paid for.”

“They don’t know for how long.”

“It’s like a cargo cult,” Carl insisted. “You bring home an American and you put him on the mantelpiece for luck.”

Jacob led Carl back to Melantrichova, a street so narrow that in places the buildings on either side were buttressed against each other, two or three stories above their heads. They followed the curl of the street, marshaled closely by ashlar until abruptly the stone walls fell away, and they were released into the expanse of
. A group of tourists had already collected to admire the famous clock, but Jacob drew Carl into the openness of the square itself.

“This is where the Czech nobility was executed,” he said, repeating something Rafe and Melinda had told him.

“It’s like cupcakes,” Carl answered.

A cold sun had lit up the yellow, pink, and green facades of the Baroque palaces that edged the square. “There’s a sort of war, you know, in Prague,” Jacob said, “between the simple and the pretty.”

“Really?” They were walking slowly together, their steps matching now. The Týn church watched them from behind a row of low palaces, like an antlered deer, shy at their approach, waiting just inside a thicket. Their steps turned naturally toward a great bronze-and-stone monument in the northeast of the square. “Who’s that?” Carl asked.

“Jan Hus.”

“And he’s one of the simple ones?” Carl guessed.

At the base the martyr was almost indistinct from the metal of which he was formed, and he seemed to rise from it, indignantly. His fingers were thick as if from labor, though he had been a scholar. “I think so,” Jacob answered. “He was sort of a Protestant before there were Protestants.” Hus stood apart from the other figures, breaking the symmetry.

“He’s the sort of statue who could take you to hell.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like the statue in Don Juan. Did they kill him, too?”

“They burnt him at the stake.”

“Intense.”

As they circled the monument, so close to it that they lost track as they walked of how much of it they had seen and how much remained undiscovered, Jacob hung back and let Carl take the lead. One of Hus’s followers reached out a hand in his misery, so that the hand projected
beyond the frame that the rest of the statue implied, and Carl raised one of his toward it, as if for comparison. His hand looked frail beside the statue’s, with its knotty fingers.

“Hus was two centuries earlier than the nobles killed over there,” Jacob felt obliged to explain. “But it all runs together in the national myth.”

Carl leaned back and looked up to find Hus’s line of sight. “He’s staring at these pretty buildings you don’t like.”