Necessary Errors: A Novel (47 page)

The path ended at the threshold of a nondescript structure: brown-tinted Czech stucco on a stone foundation. “Is this Libuše’s baths?” Jacob asked aloud. The building looked modest and utilitarian.

“It’s a shed, I believe,” said Annie.

Annie folded her arms. Jacob tried to look into a window, but he couldn’t see anything. The woods continued behind the shed, sloping downward. He took two steps and sank into a layer of black leaves that the snow had hidden.

“Please don’t, Jacob. It’s a drop and then there’s that highway along the Moldau.”

“I’m not going to fall onto a highway,” he assured her, but he returned to the path.

They began to retrace their steps. Jacob hated to give up on a search, and he became sullen.

“Are you still off men?” Annie asked.

“I’m not off them.”

“I mean not looking. Not for now.”

“Yes,” Jacob said.

“I believe I am as well.” She glanced at him. He sensed that she wanted him to ask a question, but he had noticed a scratchiness in the back of his throat and he decided to conserve his energy. “I have this feeling of sufficiency,” she continued. “I have the
. I have my teaching. I’m quite good at teaching, you know. My students are quite fond of me, have I told you that? They pay us so little, yet I find myself saving crowns. I was telling Melinda, sometimes I feel as if I could go on for years here.”

“A couple of months ago you couldn’t stand it.”

“But I thought then that I was the only one, you see. But we’re all, nearly all—it’s as if we were meant to be building something in ourselves, for now. Do you see it like that? You needn’t pretend to agree with me if you don’t. It’s peculiar to talk about, I suppose.”

“I think I’m getting sick again,” he announced.

“Are you? I’m so sorry. Shall we go back?”

They returned to the clearing. For a moment they thought that Carl and Melinda had abandoned them, but then Annie spotted them standing on a sort of rampart that overlooked the river. Carl turned to face them but Melinda continued to look at the other castle, the more famous one, miles away in the distance, across the river and to the north. “Did you see the baths?” Carl asked. “They’re halfway down the hill. You lean out here as far as you can and look left and you can see the corner of them. They’re lame.”

“Jacob’s ill again,” Annie told them.

His only symptom so far was a slowness in the way he was registering his impressions. When his friends spoke, it required an effort to understand their words in the same rhythm that they were speaking them; the meaning seemed to lag behind. “It’s just a little fever,” he said.

“Ubožátko,” Melinda consoled him. Poor little one.

“Will you be able to make it home?” Carl asked.

They fell silent as they walked back toward the subway. It took a little while for Jacob to notice the silence, because he found himself counting his breaths against his steps, already slipping into the trivial self-involvement of an invalid.

“It’s too bad the church wasn’t open,” he apologized.

“It isn’t as if one could call ahead,” said Melinda.

“It was lovely, Jacob,” Annie insisted. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

On the subway platform, Annie arranged to spend the rest of the afternoon with Melinda, helping to prepare the flat for Rafe’s return. At Muzeum the women changed lines, leaving the men alone.

Changing to the tram at Palmovka took more of Jacob’s energy than he had expected. Fortunately he and Carl found seats. Jacob wrapped his fatigue around his shoulders like a blanket and shut his eyes. He felt the winter sun tapping his face as the tram crossed the spaces between buildings.

“Are you all right?” Carl asked.

Jacob sensed that Carl was trying to find out whether he was well enough to hear a piece of news. He nodded and opened his eyes. “What is it?” But he was already asking the question from inside the shell that belonged to the illness, the shell he had built for himself in the days he had spent alone with it, before Carl came.

“I asked her if she was interested,” Carl said.

Slowly Jacob asked, “What did she say?”

“She was, I don’t know, cavalier. ‘How could I not be?’ At first. You know, as if it was all nothing, which I suppose it is. Did you like it up there? It was pretty cold with that wind. And then she said, ‘But you’ve broken the rules.’”

Jacob nodded. To help himself follow, he pictured Carl and Melinda in his mind’s eye as they must have looked as they stood at the ledge of Vyšehrad, overlooking the Vltava River.

“‘We were supposed to go as long as we could,’ she said. ‘Without knowing whether the same thought was in the other’s mind.’

“I said I was sorry,” Carl continued, “and she said one isn’t sorry for such things, and I said she was right, really I wasn’t sorry, and what were we going to do. She said, ‘Just this, I think.’ I asked what this is, and she said it again: ‘Just this.’ Then you and Annie came back.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jacob.

“Nothing to feel sorry for.” He took off his gloves and folded in the thumbs so that they could lie together flat on one of his knees. “It’s sort of nice.” A shine in his eyes suggested that in fact he saw it as a victory.

*   *   *

Carl offered to scramble some eggs for dinner, and as he assembled the ingredients, Jacob found himself beginning to worry so intensely about whether Carl was going to measure out the right proportions of salt, pepper, butter, and egg that he removed himself from the kitchen and lay down on his sofa. He closed his eyes and made an effort to let go of the numbers. He imagined them floating up into the air above him. After a time, he heard Carl call out that dinner was ready.

The eggs themselves soothed his throat while he ate them, but when he asked Carl about his face, which felt warm, Carl said it was flushed. Jacob rinsed a washcloth under the tap and took it and his thermometer to bed with him on the sofa. When he was sick he didn’t like to move the sofa cushions to the floor. He realized that he was falling back into the routine that he had established when he was ill before. He assured Carl there was nothing he needed, closed his eyes, and shuddered under his blanket, the washcloth folded across his forehead, until his trunk felt warm and his forehead cool.

Following its usual rhythm, the fever broke in the early hours of the morning, and after breakfast
walked with him to the day clinic for a new
neschopenka
and a new course of antibiotics. Jacob ordered Carl to go out and have fun, saying that
would help him if he needed anything, and when he returned from the clinic, the apartment was empty. In the silence he took a deep breath. It felt to him as if he were repossessing the space, as if he were returning to the strange peacefulness of his earlier confinement. And something like his impression proved to be the case in the days following. In the hours when his head was clear, it was as if he had returned to a secret kingdom he had once known. But
this time he had Václav, whom he sat with and babbled to when he was too feebleminded to read, and every evening Carl came home.

He went back to
La Chartreuse de Parme
. Fabrice was imprisoned high up in the Tour Farnèse, in a wooden cell fitted inside a stone one. Fabrice could see Clélia through a hole in the
abat-jour
of his window, and he tore pages out of books to make an alphabet, with which he signaled to her. Because of Clélia, Fabrice didn’t want to escape, and it occurred to Jacob that he didn’t want to escape his cell, either. He wondered if he, too, was in love. Carl, in love with Melinda, didn’t seem to want to be free. “Is that a good idea?” a psychotherapist had asked Jacob two summers earlier, when he had confessed that he wanted to room with a straight man he had then been in love with. He had done it anyway and it hadn’t had any terrible consequences.

Because of his relapse he saw no one in his landlord’s family for almost a week. Then at noon one day, during a midwinter thaw, he saw
working in the courtyard with Bardo and Aja and realized that he missed talking to her. He was beginning to mend, and he thought it would be nice to feel the sun and play with the dogs. Mr. Stehlík’s scolding had upset him more than he had admitted to his friends; there had been something wild in the landlord’s anger, as if a restraint had snapped, and it had made Jacob aware for the first time of both the anger and the restraint. It was through
that he was most likely to be able to repair fences, if they could be repaired. In his coat and boots, he ventured outside.

“Ahoj,”
saluted him. The terrier growled and circled
nervously; the boxer hung her head and approached Jacob with a moseying gait, her tail wagging.
reproached both animals, and neither listened to her, but the terrier desisted when she saw the boxer’s acceptance of him. —Are you better?
asked.