Necessary Errors: A Novel (9 page)

Jacob looked around for clues.

“You’re welcome to the rest of my cake,” she said, misunderstanding his glances.

“No thanks. What happened?”

“Do you see your man there, by the bar?”

“My man?”

“Not literally yours, Jacob, at least not to my knowledge. The sharp one. Don’t look now. Youngish, dark hair, wool sweater, a bit naff. Don’t look I said.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sitting here, with my
dort
and my
sodovku
, writing a letter to my mother, quite innocent and respectable, and he comes over to my table. Uninvited, but quite nicely put together, I thought at first. I could tell he was an American. He asks for a cigarette and says he’s in Prague for a few days, what should he see? I don’t know, I tell him. The bridge, the castle.”

“Sounds innocuous.”

“But he becomes very inquisitive when he hears that I teach here. Asks how much am I paid. Is that polite in America? He starts naming figures, in dollars. I explain that my salary is set by Czech law and that it’s in crowns. And he points to my chocolate cake and says, ‘Can you afford that?’”

“Was he joking?”

“I don’t think so. I ask what he does for a living, and I believe the word he used was ‘I-banker.’ ‘Can you afford
that
?’ I say. And he gets quite hot under the collar. Tells me he came to Czechoslovakia to get away from that kind of ‘self-hatred,’ that was his word. He wanted to visit a place where they welcomed free enterprise and were grateful for it. I said, I work for the state and wouldn’t know anything about that. And he becomes quite threatening, with this booming voice—you’re too refined to boom, Jacob, but I find that Americans often have a talent for it—‘
You will.’
And he stalks off like a little tin soldier.”

“He’s cute, though,” Jacob observed.

“He isn’t. He’s nondescript, really.”

“I think he knows we’re talking about him.”

“Does he? It’s of no concern to me.”

Jacob was out of things to read in English, and Annie had offered to show him a lending library that the British, during the Communist era, had set up in a corner of the Clementinum, a former Jesuit compound that now belonged to Charles University. To hide from the wind, they took a back route, down an alley that felt like a tunnel, past a Renaissance church with boarded-up windows, crumbling in on itself like an abandoned tenement in a slum, past a wine bar they all liked, and then, beside a store selling accordions and flutes, which seemed never to be open, through a passageway and into a further maze of alleys.

“I had a date on Thursday,” Jacob volunteered, when they were close to a wall and safe from the wind.

“Did you.”

This hardly signaled that she wanted to hear more, but Jacob wanted to try to put the experience into words. He told her about going to Café Slavia. She knew and liked the café, she said; she liked all cafés, really. He was less successful at conveying the tender awkwardness he had felt when alone with Luboš. Moreover, when he related Luboš’s joke, she looked alarmed.

“That’s peculiar,” she said.

He found that he wanted to defend Luboš. “I think the Czechs have a darker sense of humor.” Maybe the dictatorship they had been living under had accustomed them to playing with a larger part of the self as if it were false.

“It’s possible,” she said, mildly.

The British library was up a flight of stairs in the northeast corner of one of the Clementinum courtyards. Inside, it looked like a library that a New England prep school might have built for itself in the 1970s—comfortable chairs of artificial leather, a beech-wood card catalog, and, along the walls, like carefully trimmed rosebushes, a hedge of waist-high bookshelves, a branch of which jutted into the room every few yards, like the tongue of a capital E.

They browsed independently. Annie found a novel that her mother had recommended, by Elizabeth Bowen, and Jacob picked out a little
blue Oxford World’s Classic of a Renaissance travel narrative, by an Englishman who claimed to have visited the land of Prester John on his way back from China.

“Because we’re at the edge of the world?” Annie asked in a whisper, as they compared their choices at a table in the back of the room.

“I guess.” In fact the library’s schoolroom look had made him feel guilty, and he had chosen the book in a spirit of self-improvement. Over the next two weeks, even though he would find little in it that interested him, beyond a few outlandishly fictional cannibals, he would dutifully read all the way to the end. He wasn’t, after all, writing anything.

“Have you fallen for this Luboš, then?” she asked, fussing with a corner of her book’s cellophane wrapper, which had come untucked.

“We just met.”

“You fancy him, in any case.” She didn’t raise her eyes to his. “I hope you’ll keep your wits about you.”

“I’m not a romantic. I’m gay, remember.”

“You are a romantic,” she answered, and then added, quickly, “I am, too; it’s all right.”

“I don’t think that the other thing is here yet. I think that’s why he thought he could joke about it.”

“But that doesn’t mean he’s on the level.” She looked up and saw that she’d hurt his feelings for Luboš. “I haven’t even met him. Don’t listen to me.”

“There’s something very sweet about him.”

“Oh, well, ‘sweet.’ Perhaps you aren’t very far gone, then.” The fluorescent lights and the Formica tabletop between them seemed to put them in a context incongruously childish. “You should tell Melinda, you know,” she said abruptly. “It’s absurd of you not to. There’s nothing she likes better than a secret she’s justified in keeping from Rafe.”

“I probably will, before too long.”

“You’ll have to, if I go, or you won’t have anyone to talk to.”

“What do you mean, if you go?”

“I thought I told you. I know I did. I find it quite lonely here. And gray, you know, all the time. I’m thinking of going back to Berlin.”

“You can’t go.”

“Well, I can, Jacob. Why don’t you come with me? There’s a real scene there. You’d be shut of all this poxy Czech mysteriousness.”

It was as if she had ventilated the room with a draft of the cold air outside. Suddenly he saw how easy it would be to go elsewhere.

“You could teach English, as you do here,” Annie continued. “We aren’t undesirables.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, but he found later that he was reluctant to.

*   *   *

Annie didn’t leave, not immediately. On the contrary, she grew closer to the circle of expatriates that held her and Jacob, and that circle drew tighter. They all began to feel for it. At the nucleus were the Scots—Thom, Michael, and a few others—who formed the habit, after school let out, of stopping in at a nearby pub for a drink. Sometimes they also ordered the classic Czech dinner of pork cutlets, dumplings, and boiled cabbage; sometimes they didn’t bother with dinner; more than once they stayed until eleven, when the pub closed. Henry offered to join them if they were willing to meet downtown; he neither worked nor lived near the language school. Annie also urged them to move, because it made her nervous to drink so close to where she worked. As a group, they were conspicuously not Czech, even if they were no louder and no more drunk than anyone else. She hoped, too, that the clientele downtown might be a touch more genteel and put the lads on their mettle, a bit. No one else hoped this, or expected it, and it was mostly on account of their respect for Henry that the Scots did eventually move. They began to rendezvous with him three or four nights a week at the Automat, a buffet-style diner with steam tables at the foot of Wenceslas Square, which belonged to the cheapest class of eatery that the government certified, and to progress from there to a pub nearby. Annie joined them regularly at the new pub, though not at the Automat, whose food she could not bring herself to eat, and in her wake came a few other women who taught at the school, and Jacob, too, once he sensed that there would be enough women present to camouflage any lapses he might have from perfect masculinity. Rafe rarely came, but sometimes Melinda did. They had the sense that she was on loan to them, and her dresses and coats seemed to confirm the impression that she was finer than the settings they had chosen, and so, for the sake of balance and a kind of politeness, she was always particularly foul-mouthed in her
banter, to show that her enjoyment was genuine—that she, at least, did not think she was slumming.

Their first downtown pub was U
, where the waiters made no attempt to speak to them in anything but an abrupt, efficient Czech, and delivered beers with a promptness and mild irony that suggested that they recognized the Scots, Irish, and English to be representatives of a fellow pub-going culture. Their circle was so numerous that they usually had a table to themselves. There was sawdust on the floor, but the cutlets and gulash were excellent, as everyone agreed who wasn’t, like the Scots, economizing on meals in order to have as many crowns as possible for beer. The little bears that the pub was named for were painted on a sign hanging over its front door, and Jacob soon thought of them fondly, like characters in a fairy tale that he was having the good fortune to live out. The evenings were a holiday from his project of understanding the Czechs and of eavesdropping on the after echoes of their revolution, and some nights he seemed to forget about his project altogether for a while. Their time together was wonderfully insular; it sometimes felt to Jacob as if the world beyond their table, beyond the ring of his friends, did not exist.

He would probably have forgotten about his project for good if it weren’t for the problem of love. All the Scots were beautiful, especially Thom, with his square jaw and his blond hair flopping into his eyes, but Jacob was through with the mistake of falling for straight men. In America he had revealed his crushes to three straight men in a row, all of whom had been generous enough to let him get to know them anyway, and he had been able to see for himself the unlikelihood of reciprocity in such cases. He wasn’t alone in not knowing what to do about love. With the exception of Mel and Rafe, almost no one in the circle had a lover, not for long anyway. It sometimes felt as if, in compensation, they were all falling in love with one another, as a group.

One night, for the sake of variety, they shifted their drinking place north, to a pub that specialized in Slavic cuisine. The food was good, but the waiters, to judge by their reluctance to serve it, seemed not to trust expatriates to appreciate it. The beer arrived infrequently, and only in large amounts, forcing all the drinkers into a single rhythm, as if they were on an assembly line. Between deliveries, the waiters sat at a table of
their own, in a corner, drinking and smoking; they rose from it of their own accord only to place folded cards, on which the word
was printed in red, on tables abandoned by diners, to prevent any new patrons from sitting at them. Once, when Henry asked for a light, a waiter made a point of fetching an unopened box of matches from the kitchen and depositing it on the table with an aggrieved “Prosím,” instead of striking one from the box visible in the pocket of his white shirt. In revenge, Henry quietly taught Jacob a Czech word for waiter that was approximately as offensive, he said, as “bastard” or “son of a bitch” in English. “One sees, at times, why such a specialized profanity would have developed,” he added. The word could have gotten them thrown out if spoken too loudly, and it was tacit that Henry trusted Jacob not to use it—and not to disclose it to the Scots.