Necessary Errors: A Novel (72 page)

Jacob’s other adventure was less mysterious. The pages torn from his gay travel guide listed a café attached to a Wenceslas Square hotel, which he hadn’t yet visited because the location was so public and because a coffee there cost as much as a meal elsewhere. Out of options, he steeled himself one afternoon. He took a seat in the café’s second-floor balcony, which discreetly overlooked the main floor, amid waiters’ knowing looks and the enveloping dull bronze and red serge of tourist’s art deco. Older
men sipping nearby queried him with surreptitious glances, and he felt saved from them when a skinny young man with dyed blond hair walked over and after a brief pretense of needing to borrow matches sat down to flirt in earnest. He was twenty-two; he was a pastry-cook’s apprentice; he loved Americans. Not long after, he and Jacob were rolling in bed together at Jacob’s apartment. They had sex and then, because there was nothing to talk about, had sex again. Idly, postcoitally, the man regretted the ugly furnishings that had come with the
ižkov apartment and began to propose colors and designs to replace the sheets and curtains. Jacob was entertained until the man said that next time he came he would bring his mother’s plates, which were much prettier than Jacob’s. He thought he was moving in, Jacob realized with alarm. Jacob disillusioned him; for good measure he invented dinner plans that required an immediate parting. The man looked stunned but said that he understood. He added that he hadn’t expected Jacob to be such a person. Jacob shrugged.

*   *   *

Since his first day in Prague, Jacob had been going into bookstores. He picked books up from their tables nervously and greedily, pronouncing in his head the authors’ names, which he didn’t recognize, and the words in the titles, which he didn’t understand, trying to gauge literary value by the quality of paper, binding, and design. He held them under false pretenses—he couldn’t read; he merely wanted to—and he was afraid in early visits that a sales clerk might offer to help him choose or might try to draw him into a literary conversation. In those days, however, sales clerks in Prague rarely spoke to customers unless they had to. Jacob’s disingenuousness was never exposed; it was able to ripen in time into something more ambiguous.

Now he began to go into bookstores more often. Prices were the same everywhere, but there was variation in supply, now that private publishers had begun to compete with those run by the state. Several private presses were samizdats turned moderately professional; their books were for the most part paperbacks with homemade designs. One or two seemed to have Austrian or German capital behind them, and theirs had shinier covers but even coarser paper stock, probably on Western advice. For beautiful hardcovers with sewn bindings and sophisticated illustration, there was as yet no alternative to the state-run presses, which in the last year and a half had started printing older books
that had been suppressed since the “normalization” period of the 1970s, as well as a few samizdat titles. Their most beautiful books were First Republic classics whose liberalism or perversity had put them in a bad odor with the overthrown regime.

The state presses were also, at long last, printing more Czech-English dictionaries. One morning, long after he had given up looking for it, Jacob found the English equivalent of his Czech-French dictionary: a pocket-size glossy blue hardcover. He found it in a bright, new shop on Melantrichova. Cool and trim, the dictionary fit well in his hand, the way his French one did. It was really too late, though. The dictionary was for tourists and beginners; sometime during the winter he had stopped carrying the Czech-French version around with him, and he wasn’t likely to consult the Czech-English one any more often.

He looked around at the other books for sale. The shop happened to be run by the state press responsible for children’s books, and he noticed a small shelf devoted to the illustrator whose exhibit he had seen with Luboš in the winter. Here was the messy, oversize dog troubling a punctilious family. Here was a book of witches and princesses, tremblingly lined. Here, too, were a few books for grown-ups illustrated by the same artist, including the translation of
Tristram Shandy
with which the
exhibit had ended. The artist had drawn noses, battlefield maps, wilted flowers, lines that weren’t straight, and diagrams of causality. It wasn’t what Jacob was looking for and he would never “read” it, but the illustrations were in amber, pink, and chocolate, it was in his hands, and it didn’t cost much more than he spent on beer on a generous night.

“Ahoj,” he was startled to hear himself saluted.

Looking up, he saw a young blond man, whom he knew he knew but couldn’t at first place. “Ahoj,” Jacob answered. Was the man gay? He was Jacob’s age. His hair was pure blond, very short, sloppily cut, as if he were a surfer who lived on a beach and had had to cut it himself. He was watching the expression on Jacob’s face as if he were looking forward to whatever he was going to see there—as if he were confident that he was going to enjoy it. He had a long Roman nose. Nose, feet…It was the boy in Ota’s circle who had hoped Jacob would turn out to be a cowboy. He was taller than Jacob remembered. An inch or two taller than Jacob, even.

“Milo,” the boy said, tapping his own chest once.

“Jakub,” said Jacob.

—But I remember, Milo answered. —Can I? he continued, gesturing that he’d like to examine Jacob’s book, which Jacob handed to him. He leafed through the pages delicately and quickly. His fingers, Jacob saw, had the same stubby, oval nails as the construction worker who had once asked Jacob about American wages. —Well, and it’s pretty, the boy said. —Are you going to buy it?

—But it’s translated from English. Why would I read it in Czech?

—The drawings are Czech. Them you can read.

Several of the drawings were of bulbously lettered Czech words crowding and jostling one another. —You’re right, Jacob conceded.

—Well, yes. The joke in his eyes wasn’t that he knew better than Jacob. It was that the decisions Jacob faced might be better decided in a more lighthearted way than Jacob was used to. —And what further? the boy asked, imitating a sales clerk.

Jacob picked up the blue pocket dictionary again. —I was looking at this.

—You don’t yet have?

—I have Czech-French.

—But you aren’t French. You are from Texas.

—Once again you’re right.

—Well, yes. So buy. That you may support our Czechoslovak businesses.

—Shall I really buy? Jacob doubted.

—Why not? Do you have the dough for it?

—Enough.

The boy shrugged, because of course it didn’t really matter to him whether Jacob bought the books or not. Again Jacob had the impression that the boy was going to be delighted by whatever Jacob did, and the impression emboldened him.

—What are you doing right now? Jacob asked.

—Nothing.

—Nothing?

—Maybe something with you.

—I’d like that.

—Well, then,…I also, Mr. Cowboy. Shall we give ourselves something, somewhere?

The woman at the cashier neatly wrapped the books up for Jacob in
paper printed with the name of the children’s publishing house, as if the books were gifts. The pale, loose flesh of her upper arms, bare in a sundress, quivered as she folded and taped, and Jacob felt suddenly and irrationally happy, as if he had just realized there wasn’t any reason not to do the things he wanted to do, if he could do them—as if he were going to get away with living a happy life whether or not he deserved one.

In the street Milo asked if Jacob liked ice cream and suggested a place in
. They walked together up Melantrichova, along the familiar crooked route. The sun was striking hard on the street’s white stones; tourists were chattering and giggling; he and Milo caught each other’s eye. He felt the pleasure of walking in public next to a beautiful man. It was a pleasure that he thought even straight men must sometimes feel, though maybe they described it to themselves as pride or belonging. He and Milo weren’t claiming each other, but they were going to sleep together, Jacob knew. They were going to sleep together that afternoon. No one around them had any idea, and the sense of conspiracy made the pleasure of anticipation even greater. Was it too much?

—You know, I return to America in August, Jacob cautioned Milo.

—Then let’s hurry! Milo answered, and he made as if to dash ahead, but didn’t.

Later, after the ice cream, on the tram to Jacob’s apartment, they sat side by side, alert to everything happening in the car because for the moment nothing but attention could be made from their excitement. Milo let the back of his left hand rest against the back of Jacob’s right, as if by accident. Neither glanced down at this point of contact between them; they were both too canny to need to. A bearded man with a mustard-colored shoulder bag boarded at
, and as the tram pulled ahead the man began to flash a bright medallion at passengers: he was a
revizor
, checking tickets. Two rows ahead, a grandmotherly woman rummaged nervously in her purse, unable to find her senior citizen’s card. Two schoolgirls behind her, noticing her agitation, whispered, —Ma’am, here you have one of our tickets, here quickly. When the woman turned to accept their offer, her face showed surprise and a little fear. Jacob later felt that he never came any closer to the revolution.