Necessary Errors: A Novel (16 page)

*   *   *

The interviewers were concerned that he couldn’t speak German. They were disappointed that he had no training. They doubted that they could help him obtain a work permit.

“There’ll be something for you, if you want it,” Annie said, gamely. “Are you willing to wait tables and such like? I could ask my friends. They’re bound to know of something.”

“How can I wait tables in English? No, don’t ask them yet.” He didn’t think she much wanted to see her friends again so soon, and he was hoping that Markus would have a suggestion. He and Markus had arranged a date for Saturday night.

It was a relief to fall into tourism and shopping until then. A ruined, red-brick church tower seemed to be the center of the city. The high streets were pulled closer to it as they approached, as if by a kind of magnetism. The plaza where the tower stood was ringed by glassy stores, some of a great height, which seemed to have encouraged one another, with glances and nudges, to come as close as they dared to the old ogre, still standing despite an ugly hole in her head, and then, because the ogre didn’t topple but continued monotonously to stand, they had lost interest in her and had begun to amuse themselves instead with one another, with gossip and barter.

Jacob and Annie didn’t go inside the tower because there was an admission fee. “When you live here, you just piss money away,” Annie observed. “But it isn’t the same if you’re going back to Prague.” As Friday turned into Saturday, it became clear that they couldn’t really afford anything. Everything was an extravagance, if calculated in crowns, and the business of filling their time with leisure—the purchases of a snack, a bus ticket, a postcard—took on an unreal character, as if they were
paying a visit at great expense to selves no longer their own, to selves that they would not really be able to return to until they had given up on Prague for good, whenever that was. To make these selves speak from exile they had to spill money recklessly, like Odysseus pouring blood into a hole in the ground in the underworld. Whenever they stopped spending, they seemed to be walking in a fairy city where they were invisible, or looking through a grandparent’s pair of eyeglasses, too strong, at a world strenuously sharp and distant.

To save the cost of the ticket, they didn’t enter Checkpoint Charlie but merely walked along the Wall, until Brandenburg Gate. The souvenirs that were sold on blankets here were for the most part the same ones sold in Prague:
matryoshky
, badges, and Russian military coats and hats. In the discount clothing stores, where Jacob could almost afford the jeans, they recognized the other customers as having also come from the East: the men’s long whiskers and the coarse henna in the women’s hair gave them away. A small band of Slavic men brushed past Jacob as he was waiting for a changing room, and he had to look after them to make sure that the tallest wasn’t Luboš, as for a moment he had seemed to be.

“That’s bad luck,” Annie said, when he told her.

He didn’t buy the jeans.

He and Annie had spent Friday night together, but Markus had warned Jacob that the bar that he wanted to take him to strictly refused to admit women.

“That hardly sounds European,” Annie commented, “but on the other hand there is something very German about it, isn’t there.”

“Markus said there must be some men who couldn’t be themselves if there were women in the bar.”

“Well, it isn’t as if one would want to go to such a place. I’m going to have that lovely escarole soup again, at the place near the hostel.”

And Jacob, it turned out, was to have no dinner at all. Another man was drinking with Markus when Jacob arrived, a tall man with a wounded look named Ernst. The two Germans had already eaten their dinner elsewhere. Markus suggested vaguely that if Jacob were hungry, the bar they were in might serve hamburgers, but he seemed not to notice when Jacob failed to follow the suggestion up. Ernst made no
effort to speak English, though he seemed to understand it. To Jacob’s surprise, he also gave no sign that he intended to leave. In fact, when he wasn’t glaring at Jacob, he refused to look at him, as if Jacob were the interloper, not he. At a loss, Jacob prattled vacantly about his search for blue jeans. From time to time he looked into Markus’s eyes, in search of the welcome he had been looking forward to, but it was either veiled or absent.

At last Ernst left the table for the men’s room, and Markus explained the situation. An hour before Jacob arrived, Ernst had revealed that he was in love with Markus. It would perhaps be better if Markus saw Jacob another time.

“But I’m leaving tomorrow,” Jacob said. “I don’t know if I’m coming back. I wasn’t able to find a job.”

“That’s a pity,” Markus said formally. And then, as if he did take pity on Jacob, lust flared up in his eyes for a moment, though it was quickly banked. He didn’t offer to help. There wasn’t time to go into such a subject before Ernst returned to the table.

“Why did you make a date with both of us?” Jacob asked. He almost felt sorry for Markus as he asked the question, as if Markus had trapped himself accidentally in a social obligation. Perhaps Jacob could think of a way to get him out of it.

“I had not foreseen that Ernst would tell me such news. You and I have just met. You must be reasonable.”

It was when he was told to be reasonable that Jacob realized he had been betrayed. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure exactly what he didn’t believe.

“Would you like money for a cab?” The offer was almost surreptitious, because Ernst was in sight again.

“No.” Jacob made an effort to smile at Ernst, so as not to lose face. Let Ernst be the sullen one. A part of Jacob admired Markus for having arranged to be the only one of the three free of the worry that he might be left on the shelf. Maybe that was what he didn’t believe: that Markus had come into such an arrangement accidentally.

He drank the rest of his deutschmarks in another bar and cried childishly as he walked back to the hostel. He felt as if he were being taught a lesson. In the morning he woke up looking forward to Prague. In the train he told Annie the story of his displacement lightheartedly,
sensing, as he told it, that his enjoyment of her sympathy was already greater than the wound he had received.

*   *   *

To Jacob, as the train descended into the valley that held Prague, the sky seemed to be upholstered in gray silk. Or perhaps, he thought, his head against the glass of the window, it was a coat of very fine mail. The sky was one of the things he was up against in Prague. It was one of the city’s weapons.

Moving to Berlin would have been like choosing the easy essay question on a final exam, the one the professor puts there for the students who would otherwise flounder. Jacob wasn’t supposed to be one of those students. The story in Berlin was evident: communism had ceased to struggle, and capitalism hadn’t, and now the still-living beast was swallowing the dead one in dazed, erratic gulps, like a boa constrictor nearly demoralized by the size of the meal it had embarked on. It was harder to know what was happening in Prague, because it wasn’t being swallowed. Capitalism still hadn’t arrived; communism hadn’t yet altogether departed. In Prague, therefore, it had to have been a third force that set the story in motion. Or a third system, since those two weren’t simply forces.

Annie interrupted his thoughts: “I don’t suppose we need tell them
why
we changed our minds.”

“They won’t need a reason, so long as we’re coming back.”

“We’ll just tell them how boundlessly attractive they are.” The train was curving slowly around a bend in the Vltava. The river was black and dull, like deeply tarnished silver. “I
am
glad it didn’t work out for you with your man in Berlin,” she added. “It is selfish of me, but I am.”

“It was an adventure,” he said neutrally. He was beginning to regret the episode. A picture of Luboš came into his mind, and he felt a pang. He told himself he hadn’t lost anything. It would be unfair to reproach himself for having slept with someone else; Luboš had all but said that he had other lovers. But he still felt that he had cheated, somehow. It was in trying to sort out this sense of betrayal that he began to have an inkling of the mission he had set for himself in Prague. He had to feel his way toward it at first. It was like trying to find something set down absentmindedly in the dark. When he did put a conscious hand on it, it seemed so ridiculous that he nearly drew his hand back. It seemed
youthful and foolish. But perhaps it had only become ridiculous because he had abandoned it. Perhaps his abandonment, however temporary or optative, had damaged it. He had carried it without seeing it, before, and now he not only saw it but also the crack in it. He wasn’t sure he could take it up again earnestly; he wasn’t sure he could work himself back into it—see it again from the inside, now that he had seen the outside. To find the spirit of change—was that it?—after the change had happened. It was like a plan to look for a kind of bird that was known to have already flown south. And what’s more, he had thought love would bring him this discovery. It didn’t make much sense.

But then, abruptly, he found himself inside the idea again—and on the train, too, and looking out the window at the gray sky and black water. He would find it, if he didn’t give up. The shadow at least was still here. He would have to find a way to be patient.

*   *   *

When Jacob returned to his rooms, he found no note in
loopy script waiting on the kitchen table; Luboš had not called. He wound up his Russian-manufacture alarm clock—to set it ticking seemed an emblem of his return to life here—and curled up childishly on the sofa under a red fireproof blanket, which he had bought downtown for a hundred and fifty crowns a few weeks before the Berlin trip, at a department store named for the month of May. But the comforts failed him. That night, from the pay phone near the pub, he called the number Luboš had given him but learned nothing from the man who answered. When Friday came, he went to T-Club.

Ivan must have recognized Jacob’s unwillingness to struggle, because he admitted him after only half an hour.

“I forgot your cassette,” Jacob said, as he sat down next to Ota.

“Is okay, my friend.” Tonight Ota was wearing a lime-green Oxford shirt, which called out what was sallow in his features. “‘Some day,’ as the Americans say instead of good-bye.”

“Is that what they say?”

“That is what they say to me. But perhaps they do not say it to everyone.” He pulled an elbow behind his head with one hand, so the other could scratch between his shoulder blades. There were shadows under his eyes.

“It’s as if I never went away,” Jacob said, looking over the crowd. “I wonder if it will always be this way.”

“Oh yes, everyone is always here,” Ota agreed, inattentively.

“Not everyone. I don’t see your friend Milo.”

“Do you like Milo?” he asked, and then he shrugged. “He is a good boy, and so I do not know where he is tonight.” He let his head loll to one side, like a puppet whose string has been dropped. “And where were you, that you went away?”

“Berlin. I was thinking of moving there, but I’m not going to.”

“Ah, Deutschland. And why did you not like it?”

“I don’t know. The people there are kind of hard.”

“They are the hardest people in the world, and Americans are the softest, and between the two there is equal danger.”

“It sounds as if someone has been breaking your heart.”

“You are always breaking my heart, Kuba, but do not joke about it tonight.”

A song ended, and a few of Ota’s acolytes came in from the dance floor, like Fagin’s children returning from the streets. They gave Jacob nods of recognition. One pushed toward Ota a rum and cola he had brought him from the bar.

“Do you know if Luboš is coming tonight?” Jacob asked.

“And how would I know this, Kuba?” The faces of his acolytes were so cautious that Jacob couldn’t tell whether they were following the exchange. “Luboš, Luboš,” Ota complained.

“I haven’t spoken to him for a few weeks,” Jacob said, and blushed as if he were admitting to an embarrassing desire.

“There is mystery with him, yes?” Ota answered. “You are always beginning to know him, only.”

“He is always virgin again,” risked one of the boys.

“Shut up,” ordered Ota. “Kuba is also always virgin.” He stroked Jacob’s hand once, and only once, protectively, and then laughed the moment away.

A couple of beers later, Jacob’s eye paused on an unassuming suit, and then he recognized the dry features of the man wearing it. Collin was talking to a man younger than he was, but not so much younger as to belong without effort to the bar’s circulation of glances and poses.
Collin had been standing there long enough to fall into the stillness and economy of gesture of a hunter in a blind. Jacob had probably looked at him a number of times without seeing him.

“Ah, not him, Kuba,” Ota advised, as Jacob rose.

“But he might know,” Jacob answered, and confident with alcohol and the lateness of the hour, he made his way toward Collin, across the bar.

—Pardon me, Jacob said in French. Since neither man acknowledged him, he repeated himself. —Pardon me.