Necessary Errors: A Novel (73 page)

*   *   *

—Do you want? Jacob asked.

—But no, Milo answered. —It damages the lungs on you.

—You’re too good.

—But I’m an angel.

—Do you have wings?

—Of course. Can’t you see?

The two were still in bed, and Jacob could see everything. He felt for the angled buds of bone in Milo’s upper back. —Here in back, Jacob confirmed.

—I’d rather smoke something else.

—Marijuana?

—You’re so innocent.

—Oh, something to smoke like for example—

—Hands off!

*   *   *

—And what are the parents like? Jacob asked.

—Father works. As a teacher of Czech.

—And Mother?

—She died. Years ago.

—I’m sorry. Your father knows about you?

—We leave each other in peace.

—You’re going to have to tell him.

—So wise are these Americans.

—But yeah.

—Your feet.

—My feet?

—They’re so beautiful.

—What?

—It’s like ‘worth mushrooms.’

—Do you speak Czech? Jacob asked.

—Nothing is Czecher than mushrooms. It’s said of nonsense. ‘Your feet.’ ‘Mushrooms.’ ‘Mushrooms with vinegar.’

—Why?

—I don’t know. Just because. Mushrooms are pleasing to us.

*   *   *

The two of them were provoked by qualities in each other’s bodies that, as young people, they didn’t have much conscious awareness of: the responsiveness of their complexions, the richness, variety, and speed of the changes between hues—qualities only visible face to face, or face to the
nape of the neck, too subtle to be caught on film, which has to commit to lines and static tones. They sat talking naked so often and so long perhaps because they liked to be able to read the whole opalescent page of each other at once.

There wasn’t any sting to their appetites, because they were always able to satisfy them quickly; satisfaction kept their greed and lust innocent. They weren’t held back by any worry about what their episodes in bed would lead to, because it was understood that before the end of the summer Jacob was going to be leaving for America and Milo for a job as a waiter in a new casino in Karlovy Vary. That limit may have been a further provocation; a modicum of malice impelled Jacob, after all. He was aware that he was taking for himself, that he had decided not to be too high-minded or too careful any more. He was consoling himself by using Milo. The good luck was that Milo didn’t seem to mind and seemed in fact for his part to want to use Jacob in turn.

*   *   *

The city’s great cemeteries lay just south of the Žižkov apartment. Jacob’s tram took him past them every day; sometimes he switched to the bus at a stop with the poetic name of Mezi
, or “Between the cemeteries.”

One Saturday he decided to visit. Because his usual daily course took him past the burial grounds, turning aside felt at first like cutting short a trip rather than making one. He stepped into the shade of one of the Olšany cemeteries with the consciousness that he remained visible from the tram stop that he usually crossed to but this time hadn’t.

The grass that ran between and around the heavy slabs was rich, its color deepened by an undergrowth of moss. Tall poplars lined the central lane, but among the graves themselves there grew chestnuts. A squirrel dropped an empty burr, and Jacob picked up the prickled, yawning shell and shook it in his closed fist. He was alive, and the heat made him nervously conscious of it. Conscious of wanting to fuck around with Milo again, of wanting to explore every last corner of Prague before he left. The dead didn’t want anything, but on the other hand, they didn’t mind anything, either. Their monuments were colorless as if to represent the absence of judgment. He felt aware of the muscles under his clothes carrying him forward.

In the recent weeks of lengthening sun, the poplars had grown a heavy green umbrage, which rocked gently overhead. The roofing green made the paths into corridors, and Jacob remembered walking empty corridors after school in Grafton, Massachusetts, on the days he had stayed late to develop pictures in the darkroom. He had repeated a sentence to himself as he walked, a kind of charm for safekeeping. It couldn’t have been the sentence he thought he remembered, which now seemed absurdly unhappy, worse than could have been the case. The teacher who managed the darkroom had overheard him once, and he had had to pretend not to know what he’d been saying.

He came to a clearing. On a pedestal, a bronze soldier with a machine gun overlooked rows of white stone pillars, which marked the graves of Russian officers who had died in Czechoslovakia during World War II. The style was anonymous and menacing. Except for a heavy concrete star, emblazoned with hammer and sickle, the tableau wouldn’t have looked out of place in Washington, DC.

The graves of the Victorian merchant families were more comforting, cluttered as they were with elaborated crucifixes and statues of gowned women. Jacob returned to them. Some headstones bore white porcelain ovals into which a hand-tinted photograph had been transferred. On others, there was no more decoration than spindly bronze letters, fringed with verdigris, spelling out a family name. Walking south, he reached a low wall that served as a columbarium. The ashes stored behind its gray doors must have belonged to people recently lost, because the doors were decorated with ribbons and wreaths of flowers, faded and papery from exposure.

A traditional grave slab nearby was littered with so many flowers that Jacob wondered whose it was. A margin of soiled wax disks—the stubs of burnt-down candles—rolled over the foot. The headstone was blank, but a piece of paper glued to it identified the remains as those of Jan Palach, the student who had set himself on fire and burned to death in Wenceslas Square in 1969, as a protest against the Russian invasion.

He was one of the revolution’s martyrs; candles were brought to him because fire was his emblem. Jacob realized that he hated the tribute. If Palach had killed himself, he must have been fragile and unhappy, and it seemed wrong to make use of his death, even in a good cause. Where
had he gotten the idea of making his death a gift? There was always a demanding voice, saying things like that, but that voice could never be pleased.

Jacob knew Kafka was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery, which was on the other side of a high wall, and he now walked half a block along a busy street to get there. The street hummed its indifference. At a tobacconist’s kiosk, a sheaf of Sparty were tilted loosely against one another in a drinking glass, three crowns each. Jacob didn’t want to buy a whole pack because he thought he should try to smoke less. Also, he hadn’t brought his matches, and a box of matches cost five crowns. He couldn’t bring himself to pay eight crowns for one smoke, and at the moment he felt too fragile to ask a stranger for a light. If he were to ask for a light and be refused,…He walked on, forgoing the pleasure of nicotine. After all, Milo didn’t smoke.

Palach had no doubt remembered to bring his matches. He could have brought the gasoline in a thermos. When first poured on, the gasoline would have felt pleasantly cool, if the day had been as warm as today. But maybe it hadn’t happened in spring—maybe it had happened in winter. Would he have taken off his coat, if he’d been wearing one? The flames would have lit up on his arms, legs, and face almost simultaneously. The fire wouldn’t have hurt while it fed on the gasoline. Jacob wondered if Meredith had changed her mind after it was too late.

In the Jewish cemetery, the grass had been trimmed only in the first row of graves, those fronting the street. Jacob walked along it. Behind the irregular palisade of headstones, there were green shadows carpeted with vines. Scrub trees shot up and struggled to pierce the canopies of older trees, which kept out the sun.

At the end of the row, Jacob recognized the angular white stele of Kafka’s grave from a biography he had read. A little mess of ferns had sprouted at its base. He stared absentmindedly at the cleared square of white gravel that the stele rose from. Had he expected to feel something here? He remembered the first sentence of “The Metamorphosis,” but it was a strange thing to think of saying at a person’s grave, from which a person would never awake and where one changed into…what? Kafka had been buried with his parents. Jacob wondered if it had bothered Kafka to know that he was leaving them with the burden of burying him.

Jacob took a few steps into the relative wilderness behind the grave. The disorder seemed to represent what Prague really thought of the writer—what it would have expressed if the visits of tourists didn’t constrain it. Jacob had the feeling of standing behind stage, in a place where no care had been taken about lines of sight. Weeds curled up the front of gravestones whose backs, because they faced Kafka, had been kept clear. A certain protection was nonetheless afforded, even on the lee side of sightlines, by proximity to the writer’s grave, and as Jacob walked farther away from it, he had the sense of wading into a sea. Bland, dark leaves hid first the footpaths and then the slabs that sealed the graves. In the deepest rows, ivy shrouded headstones as tall as Jacob was, fat leaves nodding here as everywhere with inoffensiveness and complacency. Young trees seemed to pry headstones from their bases, and older ones seemed to rummage with their roots, though the dislodging and the rifling were taking place with a peaceful, immemorial slowness. Was it upsetting, if there was no one alive to be upset by it? It wasn’t accurate to call the process decay, because it was after all life. If you thought your death could be a gift, this is what you thought of, not the neatness of a tended grave but the abandon of a forgotten one, where there isn’t much distinction between one grave and another, and with the passage of time less and less difference between having lived and not having lived.

He pulled himself out of the vines impatiently.

*   *   *

—Here the American prepares the water for his bath.

—But wait.

—That isn’t a bother. Leave it. This is documentary. How many pots are you boiling, Mr. American?

—Four. My hamster lives in the fifth.

—We are here witnesses of history.

—Will you be a participant?

—I’m the documentarist.

—Naked documentarist.

—So that I do not frighten the native.

—Will they print these photos?

—I’ll print them.

—You know how?

—I photographed on Václavák during the revolution.

—Truly? You’re a photograph?

—Photographer, Milo corrected.

—Photographer. I want to see your photographs.

—They’re at Dad’s. Hey, you’re boiling.

—Attention, Jacob warned.

—He puts on his Czech underwear. Normally he is
furt
naked, this native. Mr. Native, why Czech underwear?

The boxers were striped red and white like peppermint candy. They held Jacob only loosely and went no lower than his crotch. He had to crumple the fabric down when he puts his pants on over them, or they would ride up too high.

—Normally these aren’t to be seen. The American ones wore out.

—You lost them.

—In the Czech forest.

—The American pours the hot water into his tub. The American must be strong in order to carry his pots.

—When can I see the photos? Jacob asked.

—One or two are on exhibit at the Powder Tower. The American sweats in his labor. He reddens from the heat.

—Are you coming in with me? Jacob asked, running a little of the cold water now.

—It will be quite splendid, I think, this documentary of the American in Prague and his pots of hot water.

—Are you coming in?

—That one they certainly won’t print.

—Are you coming?

—Wait, wait, said Milo, putting his camera aside.

*   *   *

On bright days, now, most of the streets of the
district were lively with tourists even in the early morning. Charles Bridge, however, drew so many of them away, to the far side of the river in pursuit of the castle, that in
north of the bridge one felt their absence. Along the avenues, large unimaginative administrative buildings sat mysteriously silent, their doors still, their shades drawn against the sun. Perhaps they had once been filled by government planning agencies. One morning Annie led Jacob down the neighborhood’s empty walkways toward the river.