Necessary Errors: A Novel (37 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Just a feeling.”

As they descended to the level of the city, the city gradually slipped away from their view, closing like a fan, until, at the foot of the hill, they felt the hill’s steep face menacing their backs, and a row of lamps seemed to invite them to return to the city across the empty Bridge of Svatopluk
. Waiting on the other side, the heavy, white palaces stood shoulder to shoulder at the river’s edge, as if to form of themselves a wall.

*   *   *

“My god, they’re all spies,” Carl pretended to believe. “Every last one of them.”

“Even Thom?” asked Jacob.

“He’s a sly one.”

By way of experiment, they had made two cups of what the Czechs called Turkish coffee. It came out weaker than the version sold in restaurants, but just as bitter. As in a restaurant, they had to pick the grounds out from between their lips and teeth between sips.

“Are you growing a beard?” Jacob asked.

“I don’t know. Do I look like a slob?”

“No,” Jacob assured him. It both softened and roughened his face. “It’s mature.”

“I’ll ask Thom about his case this afternoon. We’re going to that ashen wedding-cake thing at the top of Václavák.”

“The National Museum. Cabinets full of rocks.”

“Oh? Maybe we’ll go for a drink instead, then.”

“No. The building is pretty. You should go.”

“You should ask Rafe when you see him,” Carl said. “But I suppose he wouldn’t be able to tell you if he were.”

“I’d be asking him to lie.” Jacob lifted Václav out of his cage and petted him. “Of course only a gay person would think of it that way,” he observed.

“Maybe he wants us to think he is.”

“I met someone like that here. A Danish guy.”

“To impress girls.”

“
You
should pretend to be one.”

“That’s it,” Carl agreed, in jest. “That’s the answer.”

“Instead of growing a beard.”

“Hey, respect the beard, man.”

Jacob was mildly envious of the trip to the National Museum; he had to work that afternoon. Rafe was going to introduce him to the student editors whose English lessons he was taking over.

“Thom doesn’t know, right?” Carl asked. “About you.”

“No.”

“That’s criminal, you know. He’s a sweetheart.”

“I know.”

In the quarter of Malá Strana where Jacob was to meet Rafe, the sidewalk ran level with the street so that cars could drive onto it when a tram passed. The doorways had the shape of arches, and plaster lions were flaking off the keystones of the arches, as if the Renaissance were shedding the Baroque. Into many of the arches, modern rectangular doors had been fitted, smaller than the dark, tall windows of the floor above, but here and there an old, grand door remained, oak with black iron hinges, capable of shuttering the mouth of a building definitively.

The side street that housed the newspaper’s offices looked empty when Jacob turned into it, but as Jacob was hunting for the blue plaque
with the building’s street number (not to be confused with the red plaque that gave its district registration number), Rafe startled him by appearing at his elbow.

“Boo.”

“Where were you?”

“Keeping out of the wind. There’s a
pasáž
behind yon door.” He rang a doorbell. “I didn’t ask if you were ready. Are you ready? You’ll like the boys. They’re posers, but you’ll like them.”

“Prosím,” a voice said through the intercom. Jacob was afraid that the person might have been able to hear Rafe’s slight.

“Tady pan Rejf a pan Jakub,” Rafe announced cheerily.

“Prosím,” the voice repeated, buzzing them in.

They rode a tiny elevator with dented yellow walls to the third floor. “I’m going to bow right out,” Rafe said. “Is that okay?” He had folded a tram ticket into a paper star and was shaking it nervously inside a cupped hand as if it were a die that he was about to throw.

The newspaper’s office lay at the end of a corridor, behind a door with a large pane of frosted glass. The room inside smelled of cigarettes and men’s sweat. Underfoot were bales of the latest issue tied in twine. Torn pages of notes, ashtrays crammed full of stubbed butts, pots of glue, and cups of oily coffee cluttered the desks, beside each of which rose a tall, steel filing cabinet, like a smokestack beside a factory. Over one of the desks hung a calendar with a photograph of a fjord, its days marked up in several inks. In design the newspaper itself, at least the examples that Jacob could see, looked almost deliberately crude. The logo seemed to have been drawn with a marker, and the columns of type were clumsily arranged.

A tall, thin young man with shadows under his eyes threaded his way toward them. “
, my man,” Rafe greeted him.

The boy chuckled. Two other students caught up to him:
had sandy hair and a bad complexion. Marek had black hair and was sucking on a pencil stub meditatively, as if it were a pipe. Their eyes shone with worship of Rafe, who, after a flurry of introductions and the injunction, “Mluvte anglicky, kluci!”—speak English, boys!—slipped away. Nothing had been said about money. The three turned their attention to Jacob with an air of polite disappointment.

“Please,” said
, gesturing to chairs around a table where the
newspaper was being laid out. To clear a space, Marek drew toward himself white sheets of cardboard, stamped with a blue grid, onto which type had begun to be glued.

“Rafe works in castle,” said
, haltingly and somewhat tentatively.

Jacob couldn’t tell whether the boy wanted to be reassured about his facts or his English. “I think so,” Jacob answered. “He’s a translator.”

“Ten má ale kliku,”
replied, lapsing into Czech.

“Ale mluvte anglicky!” Jacob said, trying to assume Rafe’s blustery manner. “‘He has all the luck.’”

“He has all luck,”
repeated slowly. He grinned at his slowness. “There we met him. Mr. President Havel invite us. At press meeting, you know, where come the newspapers and speaks the president.”

“It isn’t usual, that they invite a university paper,”
interposed.

“It’s called a press conference.”

“A press conference,”
repeated.
mouthed the syllables without voicing them. Marek merely looked thoughtful, as if respect were keeping him from trying to emulate
English and modesty were keeping him from upstaging
.