Necessary Errors: A Novel (2 page)

“Agency?”

“Didn’t you know? I imagine you’re not one of them then, Jacob.”

“How do
you
know what they call it?”

“From the telly.”

She gathered the tangerine rind in her napkin, as if she were folding up a tiny picnic, and dropped it in the can beneath the sink. After she rinsed her hands, she sniffed the backs of her fingers quickly. “Are you coming to Mel and Rafe’s on Saturday?” she asked.

“I don’t think I was invited.”

“Melinda’s going to invite you this afternoon. She told me last night.”

He hesitated. “I was thinking of going to a bar.”

“Oh?”

“A gay bar,” he added.

“Oh? I had no idea—not that you would care if I did. It’s not the sort of thing a person would expect, to look at you.”

He glanced at the door. “No one else knows.”

“Oh, I’m good with secrets. A proper crypt.” She watched him pinch the corners of the workbooks in front of him, to square the stack. “Shall we have a smoke on it?”

“Would you like a Marlboro?”

“Ehm, do you happen to have the light ones again today?” He flashed the pack. “Do you fancy Thom, then?” she asked, as they stood up.

“He seems awfully straight.”

“He’s such a New Lad. Too much of a lad for me.
I
don’t fancy him, though he’s a fine specimen, really.”

“Are you telling lies about me again, Annie?” said Thom, coming into the lounge just as they were leaving it. He was a Scot with straight, tow hair and a Roman nose. “I heard the word ‘lad,’ used
disparagingly
I thought.”

“Oh, bugger off,” Annie answered out of habit. Then she added, “I mean…”

“Off for a smoke? Mind if I join you?”

The headmistress allowed them to smoke in what had been the shower, back in the First Republic, when the building had served as a day school for girls. There were square, cream-colored tiles on the walls and floor. Every few feet a pipe curved out of the wall, and then up and over, like an upside-down candleholder. Far above were windows, which someone kept surprisingly clean, and light came down from them as from a clerestory.

Thom hung his red jacket and his satchel on one of the hooks once intended for the girls’ towels. Jacob offered his cigarettes. “Do you mind?” Thom asked as he took one. “It’s a pleasant change from a Sparta.”

“And are
you
going to come to Mel and Rafe’s?” Annie asked.

“I think I will do, yes. Shall I see you there?”

She nodded as she inhaled. “You aren’t going to be gallivanting about with loose Czech women.”

“Not on Saturday night, no. And you, Jacob?”

“I’m supposed to meet a friend.”

“You could meet your friend another night, Jacob,” Annie interposed.

“Well, I’ll see.”

Later in the day, over a quick cigarette between classes, Annie told him that she hoped he was careful. “You know, poxy rubbers and all.”

*   *   *

A dead pig was hanging, face down, beside the door to Jacob’s apartment. Blood drained into a plastic bucket from the hollow where its guts had been taken out. One stream ran in a wet line down from the pig’s fore chest and around its neck, where it met another falling through and out of its snout and mouth. The animal’s skin was thick and pearly. Blue-and-white twine, tied around its hind trotters, suspended it from the balustrade at the top of the stairwell. The Stehlíks, who owned the building, lived up there; the pig must have come from their cottage in the country. Jacob pulled his eyes away and went inside.

He rented rooms that Mrs. Stehlík’s parents had once lived in: a bath, a kitchen, and a bedroom. Sometimes
, the Stehlíks’ grown
daughter, who went by the name
, knocked and used the bath. The bedroom had been a living room until recently; in fact, Jacob slept on a couch, or rather, on three of its orange foam panels, which he laid end to end on the floor at night like dominoes, and covered with his zipped-open nylon sleeping bag in order to keep off the chill that sometimes rose through the floor. The furniture was plywood, painted white, and the curtains, like the couch, were orange. Along one of the bedroom walls ran a low, built-in sideboard, its shelves backed with speckled mirrors, where the Stehlíks must have displayed crystal and china while the grandparents were alive. Jacob kept a few books there: a guide to Prague, a Czech-French dictionary (all the city’s bookstores had sold out of Czech-English ones), and Pléiades of Rousseau and Stendhal from the 1930s, which he had found while looking for the dictionary. There were too few books to obscure the mirror. On the floor at night he faced away from it so he wouldn’t have to see himself not sleeping.

A window in the bedroom faced west onto a small lawn, a sidewalk, and a jagged concrete wall that protected the house from the noise and dirt of a highway. A window in the kitchen faced east onto a courtyard where Mrs. Stehlíková hung the laundry on Wednesdays and where
beat the family’s rugs on weekends, stagily coughing, waving, and blinking to entertain herself. Someone had put a woven red tablecloth in the kitchen, to brighten the room, and Jacob was slowly ruining it with a candle that he lit at his dinners to cheer himself up. He hadn’t thought to put down a plate to catch the wax until too late.

He had only himself for company. Sometimes he had the feeling, which one may have if one lives alone, that time had paused for him, though perhaps in this apartment only, as if, canoeing along Time, he had turned into a still inlet. The rooms were the same from day to day, uninterrupted. Was the feeling a safe or a dangerous one? He would turn on the hot water tap in the kitchen just to hear the soft boom as a large purple flower of gas ignited and then focused in the tall white metal heater near the ceiling. There was a similar heater in the bathroom, larger and even more ebullient in its ignitions. If he was at home when the sun set, he would sit on the floor in a corner of the bedroom, his back against the couch’s front, eyes closed, a glass of water folded between his hands in his lap, and let the light warm his face and arms. He always got
up just before the light was going to pass, so he would not have the feeling of its leaving him.

The sight of the pig had taken away his appetite, but there would be no food in the apartment unless he went to the stores before they closed, so he picked up his small backpack and headed out.

In the hallway, he met
, who was just returning from the stores, her mesh bag in hand.

—I go for food, he said in his simple Czech.

“You do not want…,” she began in English, and rolled her eyes toward the hanging cadaver. “How do you say?”

“Pork?” Jacob supplied. —Maybe later, he added in Czech. —But it’s pretty.

—Pretty? She blinked and stepped back from it, her frizzy black hair aquiver. —It’s large, she declared, —and dreadful.

“Who has to butcher it?” he asked in English, with a little sawing gesture, which she watched with horror.

—Mother and I. She smiled at him fixedly as if the injustice of it were the best part.

—That is dreadful, really.

She shrugged. “You want to help, perhaps?” she asked, in English again.

“Oh no, no. You’d better go ahead and start without me.”

She echoed the sentence, to teach herself the phrase, then answered him: “Okay.” In her voice he could hear her pride in knowing the American word.

*   *   *

In the shadow of the ugly sheltering wall it was cold, and Jacob was sorry he hadn’t put on his sweatshirt under his raincoat. He didn’t have his real winter clothes yet; his mother was going to mail them soon. Three houses down, a border collie ran to the fence as he approached and began to bark industriously.
PES
, read a little tin sign in black and white. Evil dog, was the literal translation. Jacob could see in the collie’s eyes that if the fence hadn’t been there it would have let him pass quietly. The fence was a kind of permission to bark, maybe even an obligation. As soon as Jacob stepped past the yard, the collie fell silent and trotted back to its doormat on the front steps, where it curled up to save its warmth.

None of the laws liberalizing commerce had yet gone into effect, so the stores were still run on the old system and bore their old, plain names: foodstuffs; meat; fruits and vegetables; frozen goods. As if to emphasize their plainness, the words appeared on the signs in lower-case. The stores were lodged in an L-shaped, two-story mall of rough cement. Jacob pushed through a delicate chrome turnstile to enter the largest one, which was on the ground floor. There were only three aisles, and most of the shelves were empty. In the back, however, there was a great mound of bottled beer, without any labels on the brown glass; only the metal caps told you the brand was Staropramen, which Jacob liked. It was absurdly cheap, but it was absurdly cheap in pubs and bars, too, so Jacob never bought any here. There were no spare shopping baskets, because it was the end of the day and the store was crowded, so Jacob cradled in the crook of his left arm the groceries he found: a rectangular paper sack of rice, a jar of half-pickled red cabbage, a brick of butter in foil, and milk in a clear plastic bag with blue stenciling. With tongs he put into a small white paper sack five
rohlíky
, Czech croissants, slightly pasty in flavor. They were straight, like swollen fingers, because at some point, under socialism, the traditional curve had been eliminated as frivolous. He approached a board where sour brown bread was stacked. He wanted a quarter loaf, which he risked picking up with a bare hand. Last, at an unplugged refrigerator cabinet against the wall, he picked up a white paper sack of eggs. The sack was the same kind as for
rohlíky
, but with six eggs already inside, the top neatly crimped shut. He balanced it on the bag of milk, reasoning that the milk might provide cushioning, like a waterbed.