Necessary Errors: A Novel (57 page)

“You are.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” she added, with a little savagery. “I am looking forward to Krakow.” When he failed to take the subject up and instead continued to examine the creature on the roof, she asked, “Does the story really speak to you so much?”

“I don’t know. It is sort of the famous Prague story.”

She shrugged. “But it’s become a little naff, hasn’t it, with all the American backpackers buying T-shirts of him and so on.”

“It’s still a good story.”

“No one in a Kafka story has an inside, is what I don’t like. A story of his is like a silent film instead of a talking one. One complication follows another, and you never return to where you started. And all you want is to go back to the start, because everything has become steadily worse the further into the story you go. It’s cruel, really.”

“But life is like that.”

“It isn’t like that so
inexorably.
”

It was strange that Markus had had such a symbol drawn on himself, Jacob thought as they walked back into the bright square. It was like defacing a product so that it couldn’t be returned to the manufacturer.

*   *   *

Late Monday found Jacob in the northern Prague district where Prokop and Anežka lived. After the bus grumbled away, he heard sparrows bickering in the lindens that lined the children’s street. The new length of the days seemed to have excited the birds, as if it gave them time that they hadn’t planned for and had no idea how to fill except with frenzy. Two fell on the sidewalk almost at his feet, in what looked like combat
but of course wasn’t, and then skittered away, skimming just a few inches above the uneven planes of the broken cement.

At the children’s house, the vine that grew along the brick wall was budding new leaves, iridescent chartreuse, which seemed to draw and hold the late-afternoon light. As he waited for Milena to answer the bell, he heard a flutter and noticed almost at eye level a small gray-brown bird with a rust-colored breast. Such quiet colors. It couldn’t be a robin, because its face was red as well as its breast and because it was so small he could have cupped it in one hand. But in America it would have been a robin, and he accepted it on that understanding, which left him a little melancholy.

“Please,” Milena said, beckoning him in, after a brief struggle with the lock.

The courtyard had altered with the season. In their hutch, the rabbits were bolder now, or perhaps merely warmer, and eyed passersby in the hope of food, while sitting lengthwise across the mesh at the front or pacing back and forth with the lope of run-down windup dolls. On the ground beside the hutch, there grew a few green sprouts. Over long raised beds of gray dirt, three lines of white string ran in parallel between stakes.

In the foyer, at the foot of the stairs to the family’s apartment, Jacob sat on the floor to unlace his shoes. He admired a row of seedlings on the floor beside him, arrayed to catch the sun that fell through the door’s sidelights. They had been planted in recycled white plastic cups, of the sort that yogurt and the children’s dessert
smetanový krém
were sold in. When Milena saw him looking at them, she said, “I must…,” with her nervous smile, and then looked from the seedlings to the garden outside, to convey the idea that they were overdue for transplanting. “Children upstairs,” she assured Jacob. “Neighbors.
One
neighbor.” She raised an index finger for counting, then hid it behind her other hand as if afraid that such a simple gesture might seem crude. She meant that her children had remained upstairs to entertain a guest. Not long ago the neighbors had asked Milena if their children could participate in the lessons, too. For more than a month now, Jacob had found, upon arrival, a variable supplement of children sitting solemnly around Prokop and Anežka’s dinner table, each clutching a crown or two in a small fist. Sometimes there were half a dozen additional pupils; sometimes, as today, only one.
As a consequence of the irregularity, every lesson became an introduction, as self-contained as possible: about numbers, or about moods, or about colors. Jacob tried to come up with ways of turning the lessons into games, whenever possible. The night before the long bus ride, he would search his pantry, shelves, and wardrobe for props. Today, for example, to introduce the word
who
, he had brought postcard images of celebrities, which he had bought at an Andy Warhol exhibit in Malá Strana. To introduce
how much
, he planned to ask the children to pretend to sell a few items to one another.

Such, anyway, were his plans. He held them in mind anxiously as he climbed the stairs. Children live in a world of their own, and his plans always felt to him like an interruption of it. No matter how willing the children were to cooperate, he felt himself to be driving them out of their natural track and sensed the propriety of their resistance. A part of him would rather have shared in their wildness. In the course of the hour, as they grew fatigued, they would fall back into the comfort and support of the environment that Milena wove around them, which was itself another pattern that he felt himself to be compromising. Because she fed him, he felt the pull of her support much as they did.

As he climbed the stairs, his calves trembled; he was drinking and smoking too much. He heard light footfalls and saw Prokop appear at the head of the stairs and then slouch against a wall, shyly and impatiently. Anežka hid herself behind him and then peeped out to say, “Ahoj!” her voice like a little bell. Prokop pivoted backward as if his body were a roller crushing her against the wall, and she darted away.

Jacob paused to catch his breath. “Ahoj, hello.”

“Hello,” replied Prokop, putting on a plummy British movie-actor’s voice. Below Jacob, Milena laughed doubtfully.

When Jacob reached the dining room, he saw that the guest was Ladislav, a small boy with sunken eyes and black hair. Ladislav was waiting in his seat at the table, unsure of his liberty in a strange house. Jacob greeted him, and the boy acknowledged the greeting with a nod that almost amounted to a bow.

“Please,” Milena said. As ever, she insisted that Jacob place himself at the head of the table. In the middle of the table, Anežka’s doll sat with her back to Prokop’s trolley car. The toys had become a part of their ritual, as was the exchange that next occurred. Jacob asked the children
in English how they were, and after they had answered and, at Milena’s prompting, asked him in turn, Milena interrupted. “But you must first to eat,” she said.

“It’s very kind of you, but you don’t have to feed me.”

“But I want. Do you like it,
guláš
?”

“Very much.”

She brought him a plate, still steaming, of thick beef stew, which paprika had turned burnt sienna, accompanied by small, whitish-yellow potatoes as clean and polished as bird’s eggs. It was twice as much food as he would have been served in a restaurant. The children waited politely. In the tall, broad windows behind them, the day was dying. A black, ropey mantle was being unrolled and lowered, and it was lit from below, as it descended, by a faint pink wash cast by the sun. If asked about the view, Jacob would have denied that it meant anything, but it’s difficult to take a thing like the sky ironically.

He pushed away his plate and made an effort. He lay the postcards face down in the middle of the table and had the children draw them one at a time, like cards from a deck, and challenge one another with the images. “Who is it?” They recognized Mickey Mouse and Albert Einstein, but Marilyn Monroe was mistaken for Madonna, and the children drew a blank on many of the faces, even when Jacob supplied the names. Jacob had to explain, and the point of the exercise was soon lost in pidgin storytelling.

Sooner than he had planned to, Jacob moved on to his second idea. He took a bag of rice and a single winter glove from his bag.

—You’re still hungry? Prokop said.

“Wise guy,” Jacob replied.

“Wh—, wh—,” Prokop tried to mimic the words.

“Moudrý chlap,” Jacob translated. “‘Wise guy.’” Now they all repeated the phrase.

Jacob set the bag of rice before Prokop and the glove before Ladislav. Then he took off his wristwatch and set it before Anežka. “Jééé,” Prokop exclaimed of the watch, enviously, and Anežka, pleased that it was hers for the moment, wriggled into a kneeling position in her chair.

“What’s that?” Jacob asked Prokop, pointing at the rice.

Prokop didn’t know the word. “How do you say
rýže
,” he asked out of the side of his mouth, with pretend furtiveness.

“Reese,” his mother supplied.

“Rice,” Jacob corrected.

“It is a rice,” Prokop answered.

“‘It’s rice,’” Jacob again corrected.

“It’s rice.”

“How much is it?”

“H—, h—.”

“How much?”

“How much,” Prokop succeeded in repeating.

Jacob took a large white-metal coin out of his pocket. “How much is it? Is it five crowns?”

“Is five crowns,” Prokop agreed, as he saw the meaning of the question.

“‘
It’s
five crowns.’”

“No, is
ten
crowns,” Prokop revised.

“‘
It’s
ten crowns.’”

“
It’s
ten crowns,” Prokop said at last.

“I’ll take it,” Jacob told him, and substituted for the rice a honey-colored ten-crown note, withdrawn from his wallet, from which stared a mustachioed man in an Inverness cape and a polka-dot cravat. A detective or a magician. “Thank you!”

“You are welcome.”

“No, in America, you say, ‘Thank you,’ too.”

—Truly?

“Yes, because I’m giving you money.” Jacob pointed so that the meaning of his words would be clear.

“Thank you!” Prokop said. Then he repeated, as if for the mere pleasure of saying it: “How much!”

“Now you buy Ladislav’s glove. Ask him what it is, first.”

Ladislav stumbled, predictably, in omitting the indefinite article before “glove.” If Jacob had had any foresight, he would not have brought one prop that was a mass noun and one that was a count noun. “
A
glove,
a
watch,
rice
,” he interrupted, in an attempt to clarify. “
A
doll,
a
trolley.”

Prokop asked to run through the exchange again, first snatching back the ten-crown note from Ladislav and restoring to him the glove. This time, when Ladislav said, “It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said, “Five crowns!” somewhat belligerently. Ladislav laughed once, startled but amiable.

“Say ‘That’s too high,’” Jacob suggested to Prokop. “‘How about five crowns?’”

“How about,” Prokop repeated. “How much. How about.” With the new phrase he offered Ladislav five crowns for the glove. Ladislav glanced to Jacob for guidance.

“It’s up to you,” Jacob told him. “You can say, ‘Okay, five crowns,’ or ‘No, it’s ten crowns.’”

“No, a glove is ten crowns,” Ladislav decided.

—Then no, Prokop retorted in Czech.

“‘No, thank you,’” instructed Jacob.

“No thank you,” Prokop repeated, with a farcical sullenness.

—Is it my turn? Anežka asked, twisting high in her chair with impatience.

Jacob asked in English about her watch.

“Jak se
sto
?” she asked in reply.

“A hundred,” he told her.

“Hun’red crown,” she mumbled shyly.

“‘It’s a hundred crowns,’” Jacob insisted on her saying, and once she repeated the sentence, he rewarded her with a hammy reaction: “A hundred crowns! That’s
way
too high.”

“No! A hundred crowns!” Prokop interjected, taking his sister’s side.

“How about twenty?” Jacob offered.

—Yes,
said in Czech, before Prokop could refuse on her behalf.

“‘Okay,’” Jacob prompted her to say, but she understood him to be agreeing in his own person and handed him the watch. In exchange he gave her a twenty-crown note, on which a blue couple in tweed read a book by the light of the sun and an oversize atom. She fluttered it in a celebratory way, as if she were curtsying and it were a ribbon.

“How much!” Prokop said accusingly, pointing at the watch in front of Jacob. Though it felt like play money to Jacob, it was real to the children, who didn’t ordinarily handle it, and it seemed to be exciting them. Jacob wondered if he had made a mistake in introducing it into the game without explaining first that he was going to take it all back at the end. “How much!”