Necessary Errors: A Novel (56 page)

—A thousand crowns, the man in the beard grunted.

—A thousand crowns an hour, echoed the sharp one, emphatically.

—And that is little! the quick-eyed man exclaimed.

—In truth? his friends challenged him.

—That is little, that yes? the quick-eyed man asked Jacob, for confirmation. —You aren’t rich.

The part of Jacob that was still a boy from a public school, who had worked hard to get into and through Harvard—the part of him that he had just revisited, in order to answer the man’s question—felt threatened. The man had asked his question so colloquially. “Nejseš bohatej,” rather than “nejsi bohatý.” You’re one of us, his manner of speaking implied. He was recognizing something about Jacob. A part of Jacob heard it as, You’re no better than us.

—No, I’m not rich, Jacob agreed. Despite himself, he couldn’t keep a note of disappointment out of his voice. He had been proud of making so much money, even though he had hated the job. Even now he could see a way to be proud of America for having been able to pay him so much.

—But…, the man began, and then faltered. Somewhere there had been a miscommunication.

The waiter set a beer before Jacob, violently but without spilling any.

—To health, the quick-eyed man said, raising his own half-empty glass for encouragement.

—To health.

—With papers you work, the man continued. —For real work of course they pay more.

The beer was Staropramen. The sour tang was so closely associated in Jacob’s mind with intoxication that the first sip alone somewhat disoriented him. Even in Prague he almost never drank in the middle of the day. It was too late to ask for a soda water, though. He would drink only half, he decided.

—More? he repeated, not quite following the man’s line of argument.

—They pay more if you make houses, roads, plates. As the man said the word for plates, he gave a quarter-turn with his thumb to the stack of plates in front of him, by way of demonstration. —Cigarettes, he added, with a nod to the Sparta he was smoking. From the gestures, Jacob saw that the man thought that it was the difference in language that was keeping Jacob from understanding.

—They pay more to those, who work with their hands, the man tried again, with the manner of someone who has been reduced to saying something so obvious that he is afraid that he risks sounding impolite. Now Jacob got it. A road was more valuable than a corporate newsletter, so a construction worker like him would naturally make more than a paper-pusher like Jacob.

—But in America…, Jacob began. He paused. The man’s eyes caught him again. Jacob kept expecting to see a taunt or a challenge in them, but they held only a concern that Jacob should understand that he hadn’t meant to hurt Jacob’s feelings. He believed that the world wanted nothing so much as the muscular power that Jacob could see in the line of his neck as it descended into his work suit. He believed that the world badly wanted him to work in the sun and have a little beer in his belly at midday. He was the base, and he had been obliged to remind Jacob that Jacob was the superstructure. The reminder was inadvertent, not a personal matter. It was only the man’s rough-and-tumble way of being in the world.

He actually doesn’t know, Jacob marveled silently. He doesn’t realize
that capitalism will pay those who work with paper more than those who work with their hands.

—When I return to America, they won’t pay me that much again. Me personally. The work was unusually well paid, in my case.

—But still, the man said, relaxing as he sensed that Jacob held nothing against him. He turned to his friends to make sure they were admiring the plenty that he thought was in store for them all.

—Please, the waiter said, as he laid Jacob’s plate on the table.

—A good appetite, the quick-eyed man wished Jacob, and his friends seconded the wish with nods.

With his fork Jacob cut a wedge from one of the dumpling slices and dredged it in the grayish purple cabbage. The food tasted the same as it did everywhere in Prague—the dumplings were as bland and dense as the white of a bagel, the steamed cabbage was both tart and sweet, like a jam or a relish. Jacob ate quickly because he felt embarrassed. He felt as if he were sharing a table with someone who hasn’t heard the news that his girlfriend is going to break up with him. From time to time, as he ate, he smiled at the man, nervously and treacherously.

*   *   *

“He’s not my cup of tea, really, Kafka,” Annie said, when Jacob met her the following Saturday in Old Town Square, near the horologe. She said
Kaff-ka
rather than
Koff-ka
. In the sun they were almost warm.

“He has to be. You’re in Prague.”

“He doesn’t have to be, Jacob. Don’t be so bloody sure of everything.”

“I’m not.”

“I could be more of a Rilke person, for example.”

“Are you?”

“No, but I could be, for all you know.”

“What do you have against Rilke?”

“The same as against Kafka, I suppose. He’s always in a fret.”

“But what if his life was like that?”

“I’m not obliged to read about it.”

“We don’t have to go to the exhibit, you know.”

“Don’t be a prat, Jacob. I said I would go.”

“It’s right in here,” he said. He pointed to one of the yellow layer-cake buildings that Jan Hus faced.

“It’s just that I’m not fond of insects.” As a door thudded shut behind them, they found themselves suddenly alone in a dim, silent foyer. A heavy gray drapery blocked access to the rest of the ground floor, so as to guide visitors up a flight of stairs. The steps were red-and-white marble, mottled like salami.

“There won’t actually be insects,” Jacob said.

“I know,” she said as they ascended. “Only pictures of insects.” Then, softening, she added, “I am half-mad, you do know that, don’t you. I am glad you’re well again. I have missed our outings.”

A small round woman with boxy glasses took from them one crown fifty hellers each and then tore small tears in two chits to represent their payments.

Annie hummed to herself contentedly, hugging her large leather purse tight, as she drifted away from Jacob into the center of the gallery, which they had to themselves. It was not a large room. The walls were yellow and tricked out with baroque molding; a strip at waist height defined a dado, and at intervals, shallow pilasters interrupted the walls, as if to suggest but not insist on alcoves. In most of the pseudo-alcoves, a small lithograph was hanging. In the last one, several copies of the same book lay in a glass case, open to different pages.

“Have you read
The Metamorphosis
?” Annie asked.

“A while ago. I guess I’d have to read it in Czech if I wanted to reread it here, since he’s neither British nor American.”

“I told my students about your American library, by the way.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“And why not?”

“It’s all spy novels and presidential biographies and Mark Twain in schoolboy editions.”

“I don’t mind a spy novel now and then, myself,” Annie objected, putting herself, on principle, in the way of Jacob’s dismissal.

“I think they figured that since no Czechs would dare go to a library attached to the American embassy, they might as well stock the sort of thing CIA agents like to read.”

“Is it Agency to read Mark Twain, then?”

“I imagine that CIA agents like to think that it is, when they’re filling out questionnaires about what to put in the embassy library.”

The exhibit they had come to see was of lithographs by a German
Praguer, a friend of Kafka’s, who had been commissioned to illustrate the first Czech translation of
The Metamorphosis
. In the first image, the creature sat in a chair facing a large window that fronted a street. Its back was scaled like a fish’s. It was propped on edge like a turtle, and it was waving many childlike hands. The expression on its face, which seemed to end in a platypus’s bill, was so ambiguous that the creature could have been welcoming the people it saw in the street or threatening them.

“Did I tell you that I told Henry?” Jacob asked.

Annie looked at him with alarm. “You told him?”

“That I’m gay,” he specified.

“Oh,
that
.” She returned to studying the lithograph. Jacob leaned in again, too. A cluster of human eyes stared out of the valance above the window that the creature was looking through, as if the eyes were a pattern in the fabric. “A bit morbid, isn’t it?” she said. “Paranoid. And how did Henry take it?”

“Oh, he took it well. It was part of my story for this week. In our group, in our poetry corner.”

“You don’t actually write poetry now.”

“No, but I told Carl that you call it that, and he’s started calling it that, too. ‘Henry’s poetry corner.’”

“He
would
take it well,” Annie said. “He would see the freedom, like. That would be what he sees in it.” She was pleased that Jacob’s report confirmed her estimation of Henry’s liberality, and this pleasure seemed, by adding to her confidence, to aggravate her impatience with the exhibit. Almost dancing, she walked ahead to the next image. “Gah,” she said, squinting at it, twirling with a finger a loose curl of her hair. “It’s a lad thing in the end,” she said, in a half whisper that was both conspiratorial and mocking. “That idea of freedom. Not that he would know what to do with a bloke.”

“I think men do know, usually.”

“Do they?” She looked suddenly at a loss.

“Because they’re men themselves.”

“I’m sure you know more about this sort of thing than I,” she replied, with brittle diffidence. She had lost her confidence again.

“Annie.”

“What?” she challenged and silenced him.

In the second lithograph, the creature hid under a sofa while the sister entered the room with a plate of food. Sewn into the back of a chair was another uncanny eye, singular like the Masonic eye on the back of a dollar bill. In this picture the creature’s face appeared more crustacean. It was such a strange punishment, if that’s what the transformation was.

“I’m thinking of not Friday week but the Friday after that, for Krakow.”

“Two weeks from Friday,” Jacob translated.

“Can you and Carl manage it then, do you think?”

“I think so.”

“We’ll have a grand time,” she promised, and as she spoke, she seemed to be looking at the time they were going to have and drawing courage from it.

In the third image, the family were seated around a table. The father’s eyes were closed and his head tilted back, as if he were dozing, and a Masonic eye looked out from the back of his chair, too. Did the eye represent enlightenment of some kind, or was exposure to view part of the ordeal of the son-creature? The mother was worrying a vague white cloth. The creature peered in from the next room, hunched over on all fours, or however many feet it had. Its representation was out of accord with the laws of perspective, too large and too flat—like a figure in a medieval painting that has attracted a disproportionate share of the artist’s attention.

“Do you remember the way the sister brings different kinds of food,” Jacob asked, “and he discovers that he likes moldy cheese and rotting vegetables?”

“It’s a perfectly vile story, in my opinion.”

“I wonder if it stands for homosexuality. It arises in the family, it provokes disgust. He discovers in himself new appetites. The father wants to punish him.”

“Wouldn’t there have to be another beetle or what have you?”

“No. If you find yourself disgusting, sex is a way of cutting yourself off, not of connecting you.”

Annie seemed unconvinced. “I always thought it had something to
do with money, myself,” she said. “From the way he talks about his job. He sounds like a beetle even before he realizes he is one, if you know what I mean. Sort of deadlike and industrious.”

“He’s capitalism,” Jacob said.

“Or just, losing hope, rather.”

“If you have no love, that can happen.”

“It isn’t just gays it can happen to.”

In the next picture, the markings on the creature were such that it resembled a flattened globe of the Earth, and it was ringed by its hands, like a crab on its back ringed by its claws. An old woman stood over it holding a square broom. It could also stand for incest, Jacob thought. There was so much of the sister in the story.

“Do you mind if on the way to Krakow we went—I mentioned it to Carl but he said he couldn’t speak for you—I’ve always been curious, you see.”

“What?” Jacob asked.

“If we went to—I’m not good at pronouncing it—Oss-vee—”

“Where?”

“Will you let me speak? I haven’t even said the name of it yet. Oss-vee—well, Auschwitz is the name you would know it by, anyhow. If you don’t want to, I understand, and I can go by myself while you and Carl go elsewhere. I can take the bus or what have you. It’s right there, where we’ll be, practically.”

He found that the suggestion unsettled him, and though Annie moved on to the next image, he stayed where he was, because he had lost his focus and was staring at the image without seeing it. Instead of recognizing the creature, he felt, he was merely resting his eyes on the round pattern in the lithograph where it was supposed to be. A hollow pattern. For the moment the shape was like—what had been the word for the tattoo on Markus’s back? A mandala. He hadn’t thought of Markus in a while.

“Who is this?” Jacob asked, calling Annie back. He pointed to the woman with the broom. “I don’t remember this character.”

“She’s the char, isn’t she? The one who finds him. Such a beastly story.”

“Finds him?”

“I believe he’s dead in this picture.”

Jacob now noticed the family clinging to the sides of the image, framing it.

In the last image, slightly larger than the others, the creature was standing on the roof of a Prague apartment building, now with a head shaped like a squirrel’s and eyes like an owl’s. It had the same innocent hands. Its back was dissolving in a flurry of lines, which must have been intended to represent beating wings.

“Does he fly?” Jacob asked.

“I couldn’t tell you for certain but I don’t believe so,” Annie answered. “It’s too bad Henry is such a priss about his writing group, because I’m quite well read, for someone who’s not a Harv.”