Necessary Errors: A Novel (77 page)

“Are you going to work for him?” Jacob asked.

“I suspect, that I am not. But it is an opportunity for you, I think.”

As Jacob walked to his bus stop, Ivan described the man’s office on the northern periphery of the city, in a concrete building that the authorities had erected as a temporary structure not long after World War II but had never got around to demolishing and replacing. It didn’t have many windows. A tram depot was across the street. Through the fence one could see some trams of an older design, which no longer ran, but which Ivan remembered from childhood.

“I’m going back to America pretty soon, I think,” Jacob said.

“But it is an opportunity,” Ivan persisted. He drew his right hand up and out, an expansive gesture not at all in keeping with his usual birdlike manner. He must have picked it up from the young businessman.

“I don’t think I should,” Jacob said. He felt that he was being ungrateful and slightly cruel.

That night he met his expatriate friends at the Country Club. At the back of the building’s lobby, at the top of the stairs that led into the basement hall, it was possible to look over the banister and survey the rows of folding tables below. At first Jacob didn’t see anyone he knew. He had arrived a little early; perhaps he was the first one. The dance floor was empty; the dedicated dancers, distinguishable by green knickers on the men and red aprons on the women, were drinking in a loose group at the bar in the far corner. A hum of talk was diffused by the hall’s echoes and rose generally, like the cigarette smoke, which, as it was stirred by the hall’s hot lights, dissolved into a glare that filled the volume of the room. Down into this brightness Jacob squinted until at last he spotted
Annie at a distant table. Elinor was sitting daintily across from her, and Vincent next to Annie, his large hands folded on the table in front of him. Jacob took the stairs quickly.

“Do you know if any of the fellows are coming?” Vincent asked at once.

“The fellows?” Jacob echoed.

“Vincent doesn’t care to be sentenced to a night of conversation with women,” said Annie.

“Not a night of
conversation
, no,” replied Vincent.

“You see?” said Annie. “Elinor and I were just having a chat about Czech ice cream. I’m partial to the apricot myself.”

“Have you been to the place in
?” Jacob asked. It was the one Milo had taken him to, on the day that Milo had picked him up in the bookstore.

“They give you a biscuit with it there, don’t they. A wafer, I suppose you would call it. No, that’s not right. A
cookie
. Is that the word?”

“I must try it out,” Vincent said, as if Annie had urged him to go.

“You haven’t heard from Melinda,” Annie suggested.

“No.”

“I thought by now surely one of us would have done.”

“Where are these friends of yours?” Vincent asked.

Annie looked at him without answering.

“Rome, we’re pretty sure,” said Jacob.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I quite like Rome,” Vincent said.

Thom and Jana arrived. Jana was beginning to show, and the effort of walking down the stairs lightly flushed her face, which seemed to have taken on some of the translucency of an infant’s complexion.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Annie whispered. Then, aloud: “And how are the two of you keeping?”

“Jana’s grand, as you see, but I seem to have put on a little flesh.” Thom opened his coat and swiveled. “Am I in danger of losing my girlish figure, do you think?”

“Would it be the
pivo
?” Annie wondered.

“I say, that it is a bun in
his
oven,” said Jana.

“Wouldn’t that be a state of affairs, if we could both have come down with one at once?”

“Like earthworms or something,” said Jacob.

“Earthworms
are
hermaphrodites, aren’t they?” said Vincent. “I’d forgotten that.”

“What have you done to me, my dear?”

Thom and Jacob went to fetch a round: Mattoni for Jana, glasses of Staropramen for everyone else. When they returned and set the glasses down on the red-and-white gingham, the disks of the liquid’s surface trembled.

“Will the poetry corner be having any more meetings?” Annie asked. “I don’t suppose you will, now Carl’s gone.”

“What’s this?” Vincent interposed.

“For a while we tried to have a writing group.”

“Jana here was telling us she’s going to be working as a writer,” Annie said.

“As a translator,” Jana amended.

“For that paper,” Annie explained. “The one that’s published here in English. There must be loads of Harvs on it, I should think.”

“That’s great,” Jacob congratulated Jana.

“They pay little,” she replied, “but perhaps I shall learn something, if I will be clever.”

“Did
you
know that their reporters don’t speak Czech?” Annie asked Jacob.

“No.”

“Nor I. Should we have tried to write for it, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Vincent broke in: “I should have thought that sort of thing would be very much up your street, Jacob.”

“It didn’t occur to me.” He thought of journalism as Daniel’s turf—was that it?

“Wasn’t Hemingway a journalist, before he wrote his stories?” Vincent asked.

“Are you a Hemingway fan?” Jacob asked.

“I don’t know that I’d call myself a fan. There’s something to him, certainly.”

“Oh, certainly,” Annie said and nodded with false vigor.

“Must you always be slagging me off?” Vincent complained.

“You mustn’t make such claims if you’re so sensitive.”

Maybe journalism was too close to what Jacob wanted. Too close
but not the thing itself. At a newspaper, Americans would have collected and condensed their ideas about the city. They would have passed the ideas back and forth until they had become a kind of currency, and they would expect to be able to buy him with this currency and for him to try to pay for his admission to their circle with it. It surprised him to find that he was still straining to keep himself pure. Evidently he was still on a quest.

Annie interrupted his thoughts. “Am I mad to think I can just keep on at the Jazyková škola in September? There’s so much that’s changing.”

“They’ll keep it open,” said Jacob. “It’s a state school.”

“Everyone else seems to have a plan of some kind.”

“You really are going to stay.”

“I told you I might do.”

A microphone whined briefly. The musicians had been unhurriedly gathering in the corner where they performed, and some began to pluck at the strings of their instruments, tuning them. There was a velvet thud as the caller touched his microphone and then a sound like someone pulling a crick out of his neck as the caller twisted it to adjust the height. —Ladies and gentlemen, the caller said in Czech, but the musicians signaled that they weren’t ready yet, and he didn’t continue. Dancers took last swigs of their beers and trotted out to their places on the floor.

“Milo took me swimming last weekend,” Jacob told Annie, not privately.

“Did he.”

“Where did you go?” Jana asked. “To the stadium at Podolí?”

“He took me to a quarry that he said was called Amerika.”

“Ah, Amerika! And did you like?” Jana asked.

“It was very nice,” Jacob said, nodding. “It’s an old limestone quarry that’s filled up with springwater,” he added, still trying to interest Annie.

“They turn there all our films about the American West,” Jana explained. “So we Czechs think it is literally America. Were the people, how do you say, without clothes?”

“Nudist? You know, there were a couple of people who didn’t seem to be wearing much, but I didn’t think I should look.”

“That would rather spoil the effect, I should think, not looking,” said Thom.

“I mean, I didn’t know if they were supposed to be nude.”

“Supposed to be?” Jana asked, amused.

“That doesn’t make sense, does it,” Jacob admitted.

“Who did you say took you there?” Thom asked.

“Milo,” said Jacob. “This guy I’ve been seeing, sort of.”

“There’s a bit more to it than ‘seeing,’” said Annie.

The caller broke into a stream of speech. The dancers on the floor before him were holding themselves tautly and self-consciously in position. The caller counted down, the fiddlers attacked their fiddles, and the dancers began to turn, the bright cloth of their costumes shifting in symmetrical arcs and swirls. They wheeled one another around in fours, the wheels tightening and relaxing as the caller issued new instructions, which came every four bars or so. He gave the calls in English, in what sounded like it was meant to be an American accent. So pronounced a curl was given to the vowels that to Jacob the accent sounded almost like a parody. It reminded him of the English spoken by the DJ at T-Club—the English in which he had announced songs, in between his muttered messages in Czech to his brothers-in-arms. It was a plastic language, a toy language. The speakers here were better than in T-Club, though, and conveyed the caller’s voice distinctly over the galloping, cheery music.

“How long have you been seeing him?” Thom asked.

“Just a few weeks. Maybe almost a month.”

“And here I’ve been dating a Czech since the dawn of time, and have I been brought to a nudist swimming hole? It hardly seems fair.”

“Amerika is too dangerous for you, my dear,” said Jana. “You would fall on the rocks. I will take you to Šárka, though perhaps when I am not in this state.”

“Do they wear swim trunks at this Šárka?” Thom asked.

“Only those who want to.”

“That’s all right, then. Will you come, Annie?”

“I don’t see why not,” Annie answered, indifferently. “Though I don’t promise that I will take my clothes off myself.”

“Where my parents stay in Greece, quite a few of the beaches are nudist,” Vincent volunteered.

“I suppose I’ll go if Annie does,” said Elinor. “Oh, look.”

Henry was emerging from the foot of the stairs, followed by Hans. They had been drinking; Henry stalked toward them across the room with a somewhat comical gait. Despite the lateness of the season, he was
wearing his army green coat, the seams of which were by now fraying, and he had folded his arms through the vent so as to hide both his hands inside, double-Napoleon style. His steps were bowlegged, and he was holding his shoulders stiffly.

“He’s well away, isn’t he,” Vincent commented.

When Henry reached the table, he bent over, looked to either side conspiratorially, and then pulled out from beneath his coat two paper cups of French fries with mayonnaise.

“Hranolky!” exclaimed Jana.

From the side pockets of Henry’s coat came three more cups’ worth. A certain amount of mayonnaise had gotten smeared inside one of the pockets, and Henry tried to wipe it out with a scrap from a newspaper he’d been reading.

“You’re champions,” said Elinor, as the fries were being distributed around the table communally. There was no kitchen at the Country Club for some reason.

“You weren’t challenged by the biddie at the door?” Thom asked.

“We gave her the impression that we were well and truly pissed,” said Henry.

“Not quite a wrong impression,” noted Hans.

“Where are they from?” Jacob asked. “Do you remember Arbát?” There had been a fast food restaurant by that name on Na
when Jacob first arrived in the city. The sign outside had been in Cyrillic lettering; inside, the décor had been red and yellow, the colors of the Soviet flag. Jacob had discovered it in his first week in Prague, when everything was novel to him, and it seemed now to belong to a different city, which in a way it did. It had closed not long after—perhaps it had formally been an undertaking of the Soviet Union’s and had had to be shut down on that account—and Jacob had never been able to go back to it.