Necessary Errors: A Novel (22 page)

“So-so.”

Father and daughter repeated the expression, which seemed to amuse them. “That is, between?” Mr. Stehlík asked.

“A little less than between,” Jacob clarified.

“There is hospital here,”
said, pointing on a map to a clinic just beyond their post office, “but is closed. I call friend, who is doctor; he is not at home. But there is doctor at night hospital, and I speak to him. He say you must come. But is here.” She pointed to a boxed red cross halfway to the language school. She waited for Jacob to understand the implication.

The Stehlíks did not own a car. “Taxi?” he asked.

“Taxis are asleep. By night tram. But I will go with you.” She gave him a moment for the idea to sink in, and then repeated, “By night tram!” in a commiserating exclamation.

After midnight, night trams ran less than once an hour. “No, I’ll just go to sleep. I’ll be better tomorrow.”

“You may not. Temperature is too high. Doctor say, that you must to him. He is nervous.”

“Ježišmarja,” Jacob permitted himself. The women laughed.

—At least he is speaking Czech well, Mr. Stehlík observed, in that language.

“I go to dress,” Jacob said, falling into what he thought of as a Czech pattern of English.

—The next tram will come at two forty,
said, consulting the laminated schedule they kept by the phone. —I will come for you at two twenty-five.

—Thus, agreed Jacob.

In his rooms he dressed properly, pocketed his passport and long-term residence permit, and laid on the couch to wait out the interval.

—It is unbelievable, he complained to
, ungratefully, when she came to fetch him.

—It is unbelievable, she agreed with a shrug. —And nevertheless…

They had to walk to the head of the street to cross the highway, because of the concrete wall that shielded the neighborhood from it. The night tram’s line ran through a field on the far side, a large empty field adjacent to a factory that built engines and industrial machinery. It was lit by street lamps, which looked out of place because there was no street. There were only the tram tracks and high dead grasses, and here and
there curving wet furrows where the wheels of a backhoe or a truck had bitten through the raw soil. At the bottom of a gully a dozen unused concrete sewer pipes were stacked in a shoddy pyramid. To power the tram, a web of electrical wires curved through the air, below the lamps but high above the ground.

Until the tram came, Jacob didn’t say anything. He was angry at his bad luck, and he was making a show of his frailty and his need to conserve his strength.

—I’m going to die, he said when they were safely aboard. They were the only passengers. In Czech his sentence consisted of a single word, compact and strange. He repeated it for the pleasure of the sound. —I’m going to die…on a night tram.

—It is a special fate, for an American,
observed.

He groaned, because he really did feel miserable.

—But don’t speak that way. Truly you aren’t going to die.

—Truly?

—It isn’t possible. On a tram? It is nonsense.

She closed a window for him. She was right. The tram was even more simple and solid than his bedroom, and its progress suggested that nothing aboard it could be final. The wires sang as the tram rounded the corner at the top of the field. It edged past a checkerboard of motley vegetable patches, now dry and silver.

—But I am going to die, he insisted. —We’re all going to.

—But not on a night tram,
answered with a touch of impatience.

By the time they reached the hospital, Jacob was too exhausted and feverish to see continuously, and he found later that he had no clear memory of how they got into it from the tram. But he was able to remember the emergency room, paneled in dark wood like the tailor’s department at a men’s clothing store, each of its curtained chambers like a changing room. In the center was a great table, as in the kitchen of an old hotel. Jacob sat on the table, while a sullen doctor in a white coat attended him. The doctor seemed displeased that he had been woken; directed by a nod from
, Jacob saw in the nearest chamber the rumpled sheets and pillow where the doctor had been lying. He spoke brusquely to
and not at all to Jacob.

“Angína,” the doctor diagnosed.

—I don’t understand, Jacob said. —But
will remember the word.

—You need antibiotics. Do you understand that?

Jacob nodded. The doctor said a little more to
and then left them alone.
signaled for Jacob to put on his coat again; they were going home.