Necessary Errors: A Novel (20 page)

The only other person in the lounge was Kaspar, who poured a thermos of soup into a bowl, and as he took a spoonful of it, slurped a little. “Forgive me,” he said, with his quiet smile.

“Of course. Is it good?”

“Very. My landlady cooked it. Would you like to try?”

“No, no. Thanks, though.”

“In Czech, it is called
. Do you know it?”

“Borsht. I didn’t know the Czechs made it.”

“They do not make it. It is Jewish soup.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. Don’t get it on your clothes. It doesn’t come out.”

“Are you Jewish, Jacob?”

“No.”

“I thought, because of your name. Do not take offense.”

“I wouldn’t take offense at that.”

“That is good. Some people do.”

The trees outside the lounge window were bare for winter, and past their forked trunks the sky was chalky gray like cigarette ash, and so bright that it was a little painful to look into.

“Are
you
Jewish, Kaspar?” Jacob asked, to make conversation.

“I am not, but I think I am sorry for that. It interests me very much.”

“Do you talk to your landlady about it?”

“I do. She is a very kind woman.”

“I think it’s going to rain,” Jacob said, inconsequently. Then, more inconsequently: “I heard this morning that a friend of mine committed suicide.”

“Suicide? I am very sorry, Jacob,” Kaspar answered.

“Please don’t stop eating,” Jacob said. In just a quarter of an hour they both had to teach again.

“Was he unhappy?”

“She. She was unhappy when I knew her. But I thought maybe she was getting happier.”

“Sometimes it is a mercy.”

“No it isn’t,” Jacob said sharply.

“Are you a Catholic?”

“I’m not anything. But it’s just death. It isn’t a mercy.”

“Perhaps I have the wrong word.”

“No, you had the right word,” Jacob answered, unwilling to hear anything less than an explicit retraction.

“You feel very strongly for her.”

“I guess.”

“You were in love?”

“We had a lot in common.”

“Ah, she was a writer.”

Jacob didn’t answer.

“That will be hard for you,” Kaspar added, thoughtfully.

“We were both pessimists,” Jacob tried to explain.

“Pessimists?”

“We both thought it was going to be hard.”

“But I thought that you did not believe in the difficulty of writing. You told me so that evening at Melinda’s party.”

“We didn’t think
writing
was going to be hard.”

“No? Do you think they want you to make art?”

“Who’s they?” Jacob asked, sickening at the realization that the topic was drifting from Meredith to himself. “They don’t care one way or the other. They aren’t why it’s hard.”

There was an awkward silence. “In any case there are many reasons why it’s hard,” Kaspar said, blinking heavily in distress at having crossed someone in pain. “I should not have argued with you. Please forgive me.”

“No, it’s all right. You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“I wish that you would forgive me anyway.”

“Of course I do. Of course I do.”

Kaspar resumed his soup. It looked like blood, though of course neither of them felt like saying so aloud.

By the time Jacob had finished teaching, later that afternoon, the gray of the sky had darkened further and there was a quick, erratic wind.
, the district that contained the language school, stood on a hill, and at the foot of it, in the dusty square where Jacob customarily changed trams, he saw that people were passing in and out of a subway station that had been under construction since before his arrival in the city. If the station had been open that morning, Jacob hadn’t noticed it; he didn’t think it had been.
had told him when he moved in that the authorities planned to extend the northeast arm of the subway four stations closer to her family’s home. She had also told him not to expect it to be ready during his stay, because the government had all but shut down its merely municipal functions. But the station appeared to be open now; it seemed to be the first day of service.

Jacob decided to take it into town. He didn’t expect to find his friends. He didn’t know where they were going to be that night—probably at home in bed early, recovering from the night before. But there was no one at his apartment. Perhaps he could buy flowers of some sort for Meredith. He could throw them into the river for her. She would
have made a face of scorn at that: “Oh,” she would have said, with brittle disgust.

The station had a décor like the older ones it joined—stone polished to the point of reflection, panels of yellow-tinted metal. No placards had yet been hung to warn of fines or to point directions, but Jacob had a November stamp in his transport pass, and he knew he would be able to tell which was the downtown track. He estimated, as he walked past the glass booth that housed the station supervisors and downstairs to the platform, that the subway extension would cut a quarter of an hour from his trip to Wenceslas Square. Moscow was said to have paid for the old stations. It meant something for these to open despite the revolution.

An old woman in a blue apron hurried out of the supervisors’ booth in pursuit of him. She was yelling. On the landing halfway down to the trains, she caught him by the wrist and yanked as if she were going to drag him by force back upstairs.

—I don’t understand, Jacob said. —The station isn’t open? he asked. He could see that it was. People in ordinary clothes with no special demeanor were standing on the platform below.

—The other side, the other side, the woman yelled.

He looked around but didn’t see any barrier that he had crossed. —I’m sorry, he said. —I don’t understand. With his free hand he gently tried to peel back her grip, which was upsetting to him.

She clenched harder and yanked his arm again, startling him. —No! No! You must up! She was addressing him with the familiar second-person pronoun. It was her privilege as a woman with white hair to treat anyone as a child.

—Up? Jacob repeated. —The station isn’t open?

—Yes, but you must down by the other side. Come, up!

The banister bisecting the staircase, he realized, was meant to separate upward from downward foot traffic. He had been walking down the up staircase, as yet unlabeled.

—I didn’t know, Jacob apologized. —There are no signs.

—That doesn’t matter. Come!

—I’m almost down already. When I return, I’ll remember. On the next trip. When I return, you’ll have a sign.

—No! No! You may not go this way! Now she was pulling on his arm with a two-handed grip. —Up! Up!

—I won’t! Let go!

—You must! You must do it normally!

—Leave me! Jacob said, shaking his arm as roughly as she was shaking it, a little frenzied by her touch.

—You Russians, the woman said.

—I’m not Russian, Jacob answered, pulling off her hands with his by force, one at a time, and walking down the rest of the stairs to a train that was just coasting up to the platform.

The train carried him smoothly into the dark. He felt the looks of his fellow passengers settle on his sneakers, as they always did on the subway, where the seats faced one another across the aisle. He closed his eyes. He wanted things. He refused to stop wanting them. Maybe he even wanted to write a story about Meredith.

He ate a pizza in the stand-up restaurant at the foot of Wenceslas Square where he and Luboš had eaten the day of Bush’s speech. He stood at the counter in the front of the restaurant, which looked through plate glass into the street, and while his back was turned to the view, it began to snow. An unexplained calm in several faces prompted him to look over his shoulder and discover it. It was the first snow he had seen in Prague. He paid quickly and stepped out into the square.

From the stately shoulders of the National Museum, and from the sword raised by the saint before it, the long square swept down. The flakes continued at millions of separated points the suppressed gray light of the sky, and by attracting the eye to middle distances that an ordinary view collapsed, they gave the square a depth that Jacob had not appreciated before. They sped down toward the paving bricks and into them, like ghosts into walls, along curves that were neatly interrupted by the flakes’ vanishing. He thought it was unfair to Meredith that he had the luck to stare up into the beauty of the square and enjoy his sorrow for her.

He turned away. He remembered a flower shop in
, the Little Square. The narrow, crooked street that ran to it was nearly empty of tourists, but for a more perfect solitude he took advantage of a recent discovery and opened a person-size door cut into the carriage-size door of an apartment building, and stepped into a private passage, which wound through the interior of the block in loose parallel to the public street outside. Afraid to call attention to himself, he didn’t click on the
passage lights. He could see well enough by the twilight that sifted down from the first-landing windows of the irregularly placed staircases that lined the passage. He heard only his own footfalls. When, at the end of the corridor, he emerged, he found that the snow was falling more heavily. He hadn’t worn his winter coat or brought a hat, and his hair was soon matted with it.