Necessary Errors: A Novel (55 page)

“I was cruised by a man Friday last,” Henry volunteered. “While crossing Letná.”

“What’s Letná?” Carl asked.

“The park around Stalin’s monument. Seemed quite lively. Do you know it?”

“No,” Jacob half lied. He had read about it in his guide, but he hadn’t tried it out.

“Mmm,” Henry continued. “But all this notwithstanding, I might agree with Kaspar. I don’t see that it’s necessarily you in the last scene. Given the Henry James story and all.”

Jacob had forgotten that the essay where he’d found the plot twist had been about James. He felt caught out, and he didn’t know what to say.

“I thought for certain you had it in mind,” Henry continued, evidently unsure how to proceed.

“What story is this?” Carl asked.

“A fellow visits the grave of a woman he knew,” Henry related, “and it’s only when he sees another man weeping at
another
woman’s grave that he realizes he could have had a love affair. Should have done, that is.”

“A love affair with the dead woman?” Carl asked.

“Yes, sorry. He never had one in the James story. He feels he’s never really lived.”

“But it’s the guy weeping who’s never really lived,” Jacob broke out. His verdict had a prudish, disapproving sound, even to himself. “If it’s the same guy weeping over the same woman.”

“But it isn’t, is it? Isn’t that the point?” Henry asked.

“In my story or in James’s? I mean, if James was gay, it wasn’t with a woman that he would have not had a life.”

“I’m all turned around,” said Carl.

“Me too,” said Henry.

They puzzled silently for a few moments. “Hang on, I’m wrong,” Henry resumed, reconsidering. “It does matter whether it’s you at the end, and it matters whether you’re gay, because if you’re gay there’s no story, is there. It’s like what you said about my story. Your fellow’s not really
in
the story, once he turns out to be gay.
You’re
not in the story, that is. But you are in it, if you’re not.” Henry had pressed himself back and up in his chair, stiffly, in his excitement at handling an idea, homosexuality, that still carried a slight charge of taboo. “Because in the case where you’re gay, you haven’t failed to live your life, at least not yet. As you say. It’s regret that ties up the loose ends, that makes it a story. If you turn to the other fellow, it’s a kind of non sequitur. Not that I’m one to mind a non sequitur. It becomes a different story. The story turns without conclusion to another story.”

“Like a daisy chain,” said Carl.

“The Henry James is a story, and yours isn’t,” Henry summarized. “Yours doesn’t end properly. There’s something left out.”

It was a challenge. Henry was returning the blow that Jacob had struck when they had discussed his story, returning it not in a spirit of revenge, but as proof that he had taken it in good faith and liked Jacob well enough to hit him just as hard.

“I do know that Henry James story,” Jacob confessed.

“Aha,” said Henry, who seemed as pleased at the deceit as at the revelation.

“I haven’t read it, but I read an essay about it once.”

“That’s pretty postmodern of you,” Carl offered.

“I hate postmodernism.” Jacob noticed that his heart was pounding again as it had at Vyšehrad. “I hate it, and I seem to have written a story about wanting to live inside a story that’s already been written.”

“Or about not wanting to,” said Carl. “It’s a little ambiguous.”

*   *   *

From time to time Jacob worried that, surrounded now by expats, he was failing to get to know Czech language and culture. The day after the writing group’s meeting, for instance, the worry overtook him. He told himself he hadn’t come here to—but then he halted in his thoughts. What he was now doing was so formless he wasn’t sure how to describe it. Technically, the English, Irish, and Scots were as foreign to him as the Czechs and Slovaks were, but he couldn’t fool himself. He still couldn’t read a newspaper in Czech.

After teaching in
, he headed downtown, alone, in the stern and aimless way that he had forced himself to explore the city in the fall, when he had first arrived. He bought a copy of
Lidové noviny
at a kiosk in Palmovka and puzzled over it during his ride. He rose from the subway at
and drifted north past Mel and Rafe’s, along his old path, over the cobblestones of Melantrichova, with a dreamer’s sense of repetition, as if he were reciting a poem that he had recited so many times that the words had lost their meaning. A prayer, maybe. He decided to get lost, though he knew that with the map in his back pocket it would be hard to. He turned left. He turned left again. He found himself in a square that for a moment he didn’t recognize, but then he saw an
antikvariát
he knew. He hadn’t ever entered the square from this direction, but he had been here before. He had come one evening in search of a bar that he had heard was rough. It hadn’t been; none of the straight
bars were. In that year, Czech drunks never did anything worse than sing and tell rambling stories. They were gentle for some reason—perhaps, Jacob speculated, because even in their cups they participated in the national mood of liberation and melancholy, the blanketing pensiveness about the old order passed away and the new one not yet come, or perhaps because they had learned, through living for decades under a regime where the smallest legal infraction could ruin a life, to get drunk quietly, and the habit hadn’t yet left them. If they lived a little longer in the marketplace, experience of rivalry and inadequacy might give them more of a wish to hurt one another. But they didn’t have much of one yet. Jacob had left the “rough” bar after half an hour, bored, and he kept walking now. Soon he was in a narrow street that he had never seen before, which didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. The river must be ahead of him, he thought vaguely, but he must have been wrong in thinking so, because he didn’t come to it. Through a tall door shutting behind a woman in a kerchief, he glimpsed a
pasáž
, lit at the far end by sunlight—sunlight on a pile of yellow sand—and after the woman turned a corner, he doubled back and opened the door himself.

The corridor was quiet, except for the faint echo of a bird somewhere nearby, chattering. The arched ceiling was low and of a smooth, dirty white stucco. It felt like a violation to walk down this
pasáž
, as it didn’t in those around Wenceslas Square or those that branched off Melantrichova. To reach the sunny patch he had to walk quite a ways through shadow, and while he was in it, a draft touched him on the forearm and chilled him. A pocket of winter air was hiding here in the darkness from the spring. In the sunlight, when he reached it, he found a shovel set in the sand, and next to it a blue plastic tub with rope handles. Next to that, someone had spilled a heap of white cobblestones. The courtyard was being repaved. He was afraid for a moment that he might have to retrace his steps, but another corridor seemed to lead out, at an angle, toward a different street. At the edge of the courtyard, from a metal trash can whose lid had been tipped up, a sparrow was fetching a thin red string. “They won’t like that,” Jacob warned the bird, as he passed into shadow again. “It’s not your string. It isn’t normal.”

Exiting into the new street, he again refrained from taking out his map. The cold air of the
pasáže
seemed to trail after him into the street,
which was shaded by a tall First Republic building. He shivered. There was a pub in the ground floor, and Jacob realized he was hungry. He stepped inside.

A large room was roaring with conversation, its air dusty with cigarette smoke. No one noticed him. A sepia light fell through tinted windows. The diners and drinkers were workers, most of them in blue jumpsuits. He took a seat at one of the long dark tables, after asking permission of the men already sitting at it.

—Please, one of them said, with a gesture, and returned to a discussion with his friends.

The man’s face and forearms were dark from sun. He looked about thirty. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and the blond stubble on his chin glittered as he talked. Around his beer glass, his fingers were thick and his fingernails oval. His eyes, however, were fine and quick, and he caught Jacob studying him. He nodded amiably.

Jacob unfolded his
Lidové noviny.
He attempted the lead story, which had eluded him on the train. Newspapers were written in a different register of Czech from the one he had learned to speak. They were full of the words for handling ideas, the equivalents of “approve,” “inquiry,” and “comparable,” assembled on the same pattern as the English words but from Slavic roots and prefixes instead of Latin ones. So once he was able to identify “refer,” it shouldn’t be hard to recognize “infer” and “transfer” and “defer”…

—Please, a waiter whined.

—Good day, Jacob said, but he saw, as he said it, that the waiter considered Jacob’s greeting a waste of his time. —What do you have in the way of ready food? Jacob added, trying to be more purposeful.

The waiter sighed dramatically. —I’ll bring you a menu. He began to stalk off.

—But please, Jacob said. The waiter would bring the tourist menu, overpriced, if he wasn’t stopped. —Do you have pork meat with cabbage and dumplings?

—Of course.

—Thus, one, please, and one beer.

—Thus, the waiter agreed. He seemed relieved. Evidently he hadn’t wanted to fleece Jacob if he didn’t have to. In blue ink he wrote the price of the dish on a slip of gray paper; he slashed once, below the number, to
represent Jacob’s beer; and he anchored the slip under the ashtray nearest Jacob.

—It isn’t a bother, if I smoke? Jacob asked the men at his table. They had finished eating—they had stacked their plates—so Jacob thought they wouldn’t mind. There were three of them. Besides the quick-eyed man, there was a heavyset one with a ragged beard and a sharp-looking one with his black hair smarmed and his sleeves rolled up.

—Not at all, answered the quick-eyed man.

Jacob nodded his thanks. Now he had more of their attention than he was comfortable with. He felt lucky that he was smoking Sparty rather than Marlboros today, though he wondered if even Sparty might seem a little precious here. The men were watching him. He tapped nervously on the little blue trireme that decorated the pack. —If you would like…, it occurred to him to offer, and he held out the open pack to them.

It was as if he had enchanted them, or as if he had broken an enchantment. They laughed and accepted. They were drunker than he had realized.

—Thanks many times, the quick-eyed man said. Jacob nodded again but then looked away, because the man seemed so at ease in his skin that he was hard to resist, and Jacob didn’t want to gawk. He didn’t want to offend them.

The workers, however, didn’t seem to fear that the rapport was fragile. “Hele,” the quick-eyed man hailed Jacob. —Look, where are you from? He was addressing Jacob informally; he was quite drunk.

—From America.

—That’s what I told you, said the sharp-looking man, as he lightly thumped the table.

—Look, the quick-eyed man again addressed Jacob, as if the injunction would help Jacob cross the language barrier. —And in what way do you work?

Jacob couldn’t help but return the man’s amiable gaze. In America the return might have triggered either a suspicion that Jacob was gay or a suspicion that Jacob was mocking the man, or both, but here there was no interruption. The man and Jacob seemed able to look at each other fondly without either thinking the worse of the other, though their eyes didn’t lock, because the worker’s frame wobbled slightly from drink and
his eyes didn’t compensate for the wobble, for the same reason. —In what way? Jacob repeated, uncertain of the meaning of the question.

—Yeah, and forgive, but also, how much does it pay, if it isn’t a bother?

The other two workers fell expectantly silent. —Not at all, Jacob said. They wanted to hear the good news.

To answer honestly, he would have to say that he hoped to be a writer when he returned to America, and that he didn’t know how much writers were paid. But he couldn’t say that; it would sound both arrogant and weak. He would have to answer as if he were still the self he had been when he left, which, now that he was invited to describe it, he saw as a discarded shell. The shell, however, had made more money than he, in the future, was likely to, and he found that he wanted to impress the men. —In America I wrote papers for business, he said. The same ignorance that prevented him from understanding the newspaper kept him from describing his work more precisely. —They paid me thirty-five dollars each hour, he added. That much, anyway, was easy to communicate.