Necessary Errors: A Novel (58 page)

“‘How much is it.’”

“How much
is it
,” Prokop repeated.

“It’s a hundred crowns.”

“Wise guy!” Prokop shouted. Everyone laughed. Seeing that he had scored a point, Prokop loudly repeated the exclamation until his mother had to ask him to speak normally.

“It’s a hundred crowns,” Jacob insisted in a level voice.

Prokop eyed his own bill and the bill in his sister’s hand. “How about thirty crowns,” he offered.

“Okay,” Jacob agreed, because he wanted to see what Prokop would do.

Prokop grabbed the bill from his sister and, adding it to his own, threw the two notes at Jacob. “Thank you!” he said demandingly, palm outstretched.

Jacob surrendered the watch, and as soon as he did, there was screaming, because Anežka felt that it was now as much hers as Prokop’s. In their greed the children lost all inhibition, and Milena had to pry the watch from their fingers. As she handed it to Jacob, she said, “Please.”

She spoke sternly to her children in Czech, too quickly for Jacob to follow. Prokop, who seemed to receive the more severe reprimand, scowled and kicked the legs of his chair. Jacob wanted to signal that he was not himself upset. He slipped his watch into a pocket, and to continue the game, he placed the doll before Anežka and the trolley before Prokop, and gave the thirty crowns to Ladislav. There was a touch of danger in the air.

At Jacob’s cue, Ladislav asked, “What is that?” and pointed to Prokop’s trolley. Not family, Ladislav had had to suppress any wish he might have had to join the scuffle for the watch, and he had not been scolded, so the energy in his voice was now higher than that of the siblings. Jacob sensed, in a momentary intuition, that the trolley was a toy that Prokop had never before allowed Ladislav to handle, and that Ladislav foresaw a happy coincidence of the game’s public reward and a private, maybe even secret wish. “What is that?” Ladislav repeated, in the spirit of one who presses a second time the button of an apparatus that is balky about starting.

Prokop touched the trolley with one finger, as if to remind himself of it, and then, as if the touch did remind him, took it up in both hands, bringing it close to his face so he could peer into its dark windows, running the rear wheels against his palm to hear the slow,
razzy scratching of the inertial engine inside. “It is a tramway,” he quietly said.

“A tram,” Jacob amended.

“It is a tram,” Prokop said, again quietly. His eyes slowly left the toy to meet those of the boy who threatened to take it from him. The possibility of a confrontation seemed to alarm Ladislav, who glanced at Jacob in the hope of a late revision to the rules of the game, which Jacob could not see a way to engineer without embarrassing Prokop—without interpreting aloud, perhaps wrongly, the change in his demeanor. The rules obliged them all to continue. “How much is it?” Ladislav asked, holding himself perfectly still.

Jacob, too, held his breath. Prokop put the trolley in his lap, under the table and out of sight, and swung his legs back and forth so that his body rocked. “How much?” Prokop repeated, as if he were registering the significance of the question. Then with a quick gesture he popped the trolley back onto the table. “Ten crowns,” he announced.

“Ten crowns?” It seemed to Ladislav too good to be true.

“It’s a bargain,” Jacob said, with relief.

“I’ll take it,” Ladislav hurriedly added.

Prokop did not watch him take it but merely folded his arms and leaned forward over the table. Ladislav forgot the others in his admiration of the cleverly bent tin of the trolley’s steps, benches, and pillars. Prokop waited, aware that Ladislav had twenty crowns left and that Anežka doll remained unbought.

Anežka had seated the doll on the table before her and had brought her own body flush with the edge of the table to support its back, which was curved forward by the pull of its heavy, drooping head. It smiled its consistent smile. Anežka leaned her own head forward to speak some words of advice into its ear.

Prokop cleared his throat and looked meaningfully at the doll.

“What is it?” Ladislav dutifully asked, sensing that justice had to be done.

For the moment Anežka was pleased by Ladislav’s attention. “It is Anežka,” she told him. She was remembering, Jacob realized, the lesson about greetings and introductions.

Ladislav paused, but Prokop, with his eyes, demanded that he continue. “How much is…she?” Ladislav asked.

Oh dear, a slave market, Jacob thought. Anežka was nonplussed.

“How much?”

—But I refuse! Anežka said, in Czech.

“You could set a high price,” Jacob suggested. “You could say a thousand crowns, or ten thousand crowns.”

—But I refuse altogether! she declared, now with a quaver in her voice.

—You have to. It’s the game, Prokop said.

—I don’t have to. I won’t.

“How much!” Prokop said, returning to English. He saw that it was the mere possibility of sale that unnerved his sister. “How much!”

“How about selling a pen instead?” Jacob proposed, drawing attention to his own and placing it, somewhat desperately, before her.

—But I don’t want to! I refuse to!

—But you don’t have to, Jacob assured her, lapsing into Czech himself in order to be sure that the message got through.

—But calm yourself, little Anežka, her mother said, and held the girl’s shoulders. —In fact nothing is being bought and nothing is being sold. But the girl hugged her doll and would not meet their eyes.

“How much!” Prokop said, pointing at the lonely glove in front of Ladislav, who didn’t know whether he should answer. “How much!” Prokop said again, a little more violently, pointing at his lost trolley. “How much!” he asked, still more loudly, of the paper bag of rice in front of Jacob. “How much, how much, how much!” He shook himself, full of a child’s pleasant, dizzy hysteria.

—That suffices, his mother said.

“How much?” he asked once more, rebelliously, of the ten-crown note that he had been left with. He thought he was asking a nonsense question.

—That already suffices, Milena warned.

“That depends on your credit rating,” Jacob answered.

“Wha-a-at?”

“Nothing.
Nic,
” Jacob retracted the joke. But having aroused the boy’s curiosity, he had to continue. —Money costs more money, he explained in Czech. —If I give you ten crowns today, then next week you must give me eleven.

“Jo?” Prokop responded, as he took this in. Then, with a show of make-believe anxiety, he pushed his note across the table to Jacob and
signaled to Ladislav to do the same with his. Ladislav hurriedly complied. Their fluster was like that of silent-movie characters. It wasn’t clear they understood. It seemed more likely that Jacob’s explanation was interpreted as a sort of ruse—as a polite way of asking for the return of the bills. The lesson was drawing to a close. Jacob also collected the Warhol postcards, which had been left scattered on the table where they had fallen.

Milena retreated briefly to the kitchen and returned with a sheaf of ten- and twenty-crown bills. She counted his fee out onto the table with her habitual fumbling and overcaution, bill by bill. There it was, the accumulation they had been playing with, the disruptive element, purchasing him in the colors of mud and of berries. To Milena, there was nothing shameful in money, but Jacob was afraid that Prokop might cry out “How much!” or that Anežka would find a way to ask why, if he loved them, he had to be paid to visit. Because he had lost control of the children twice, he felt unsure that he deserved his full fee, a particular doubt that resonated with a deeper and more general one, less accessible to his conscious mind. Despite his sense of vulnerability, however, the children didn’t cry out. They felt the reality of the transaction and respected it, retreating into themselves. Anežka petted and consoled
. Prokop, still fidgety, beat Ladislav at a game that resembled Rock Paper Scissors. Jacob shoved the cash into his wallet, which the many small bills fattened.

He bid good-bye to the oblivious children. Anežka, who had forgiven him, answered softly, sucking in her breath. Prokop, who had insulated himself with a force field of excitement, barked a cheerful farewell. At the edge of the table, the trolley lay unregarded, unclaimed. Prokop had not returned to it the way Anežka had returned to her doll. The thought of it stayed with Jacob as he walked up the dark street to wait for the bus. He told himself it would be absurd to feel guilty about it. It was normal for boys to outgrow such attachments, especially straight boys. In fact, the guilty thing would have been to teach Prokop to hold on to a doll, the way Anežka was doing, and as Jacob himself had often tried to when he was a child. A spark clinked in a street light overhead. All around him the night was mild and empty.

*   *   *

The friends decided to revisit the yellow-walled cellar in Malá Strana where they had given Michael a farewell party in the fall. According to Henry, it had grown a bit louche. The place was set up like a speakeasy,
Jacob remembered, as Henry led him, Annie, and Thom edgewise through the ground-floor restaurant to the stairwell at the rear. They descended into stale air, which Jacob wasn’t immediately reconciled to breathing. German girls with angry eye shadow were sitting below the landing, blocking the narrow staircase, and the girls swore idly at the friends as they passed.

The bar and the unevenly plastered walls were unadorned, as before. Jacob thought he remembered that they had been playing tapes of jazz music in the fall, but weak speakers now emitted American punk—a thin gray stream of sound that the mutter and talk of the rooms easily broke through. To Jacob the room seemed vaguely menacing, and he felt self-conscious and detached, as if a bully were sizing him up; he felt the need to put up a bluff.

Henry volunteered to fetch drinks. Jacob, Annie, and Thom claimed a corner table. Someone had cut into the wall beside their seats the Czech word for
gypsies
and the German word for
out
. Tourists had written their names in ballpoint pen and then dated their inscriptions.

“Ehm, so, we’re off to Krakow tomorrow fortnight,” Annie announced, apropos of nothing.

“Are ye, then?” Thom replied.

“Mmm. Without the likes of you.”

“And a pleasant journey to you.”

“Just those of us who are romantically independent, you see,” she explained.

“I may soon have a right to join ye,” Thom said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Have you done wrong, then?” Annie asked.

“Or too much right, perhaps,” he answered.

“You’re a fool if you have,” Annie accused him.

“So certain that I’m to blame!”

“You’re such a lad,” she said, disgustedly. She was smoking her cigarette fiercely, wincing against the smoke that she herself cast up.

Thom recognized a man coming down the stairs. “Did Henry invite that wanker?”

“Who?” Annie asked, swiveling to look. “Hans? Must have done.”

“They’re friends, I guess,” Jacob offered, because he was afraid that Thom was upset for his sake.

Just as Hans reached them, Henry arrived with four glasses, pressed against one another like cells in a honeycomb. “I should have known to buy a spare,” he apologized.

“Not at all. I shall—,” Hans began.

But he was interrupted by the advent of Melinda, who appeared behind him, striding across the long room eagerly, her sharp cheekbones pink from her quick transition out of the brisk night into the windowless heat of the cellar. “Darlings,” she saluted them. “What a relief. I was sure I had come down the wrong rabbit hole. I had no notion it had become so ropey here. Those vixens on the stairs—bloody hell…” She drew from her purse with one hand her cigarettes, lighter, and wallet, her fingers splayed separately open, at all angles like the blades of a Swiss army knife. “Does anyone else need a drink?” she asked.

“Allow me,” said Hans. He refused the crowns that she was unfolding and, turning unexpectedly to Jacob, said, “I heard that you…that a friend of yours was lost to you. I was very sorry.”

“Oh, it’s all right, thank you,” Jacob said, awkwardly. Seated securely among his friends, he had an uncharitable impression of Hans as a pudgy child who hoped the other children on the street would let him play with them.

Hans gave a slight bow and left them for the bar.

“That was decent of him,” said Melinda.

“Is Carl coming?” he asked, softly.

“I was going to ask you.”

“Say, have I shown you Sarah’s photos?” Henry asked, producing a blue air mail envelope.

“What are they of?” Jacob asked.

“My daughter’s birthday. Mel and Rafe found me a tricycle to send her.”

“Rafe heard of a shipment coming into
,” Melinda explained.