Necessary Errors: A Novel (63 page)

“What if we sell it?” Carl asked.

“We will do no such thing,” said Annie.

“But we’re going to
Poland.
”

“Perhaps we shall sell it, then, if you’re so keen. For blue jeans and what not.”

“Excellent.”

Prague’s one-way streets soon turned the friends around, and they had to pull over and consult their maps. Jacob had brought two: a large green one of Czechoslovakia’s countryside, and a large orange-and-purple one of Poland’s. Across his lap, Carl unfolded them, as well as Jacob’s blue city map, which from long wear in Jacob’s back pocket was now softly disintegrating into tall strips. By comparison of the unwieldy, loud-wrinkling layers, they plotted a course. With Carl navigating, they crossed a bridge, drove down the hill where Jacob and Annie’s language school stood, and then turned east, along the tram tracks that Jacob and Carl rode home every evening. They passed the hospital Jacob had visited. Half a block from the Stehlíks’, they reached the highway, and in a few minutes, the last
panelák
was behind them and abruptly they were among cultivated fields, methodically furrowed and just beginning to sprout pale green.

Jacob cracked his window. Annie, in the back seat, took out her letter, and Carl, without saying anything, took out his. They were getting away with driving a car to Krakow, unwatched, unregulated. Jacob had the company of Carl and Annie, his ironic friend and his earnest one, and the three of them had the solidarity of their mistreatment by the god of love. The highway was for the most part empty; between villages it was so empty that they might have been the last people still living in the world. The only challenge was not to drive so fast that the curves became unsafe; there was no one to hit or be hit by. Maybe he wanted nothing more than to be away for a little while from the burden of living in another country, to return to the insouciance of merely visiting, of mere tourism; maybe he wanted to slip away for a while from the inchoate duty he had set himself of finding the spirit of change, if that was indeed the name of the spirit he was pursuing.

A few hours outside Prague, the three climbed into a massive concrete hammer and sickle that they found beside the highway, a memorial to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Hitler, and Carl took snapshots. When they took a wrong turn near the border, they were frightened by a smoggy valley, where fire spouted from black chimneys and long milky puddles lay like mirrors in a landscape of pale, clean-looking clay, free of life.

*   *   *

A few days later, in Krakow’s main square, the afternoon was mild and Jacob offered to pay the cover at an outdoor café. He owed his friends a treat for the day before. He had started off well at Auschwitz, but at Birkenau he hadn’t been willing to get out of the car.

They chose a table with a parasol, which sheltered their faces but let the sun fall on their hands. To read the menu, Annie perched her sunglasses in her hair. They were in sight of the basilica and grand stone market hall. Though the aura of Krakow was medieval, the city was full of young people—students at its university and seminary. Jacob wondered when the Communists in Poland had so relaxed as to allow a seminary. From the glimpses the friends had had, as they passed the seminary’s plain yellow buildings, the solemn older gentlemen in robes and the teenage pupils with lowered eyes seemed well established in their forms, as if the seminary had been running for years, but perhaps they only seemed that way to outsiders; maybe the men had found refuge
behind the walls as recently as last year. The city’s university students showed no such formality, of course, in their dress and manners. Many of the clothes they wore were new to Jacob. The buses, garbage cans, and many canned goods in Krakow were identical to Prague’s, but the market economy had touched young people’s wardrobes. A few even wore T-shirts with English-language mottoes boasting about the city’s university. In Prague, too, such T-shirts existed, but only tourists bought or wore them. For some reason Czechs never wore T-shirts as outer garments.

Carl’s voice interrupted Jacob’s thoughts: “I thought it would be easier in Krakow to be away from Melinda. Can I say that?”

“You can say anything,” Jacob assured him.

“I can, can’t I,” Carl said, “because I’m going home soon. I have to take advantage of irresponsibility while I still can.”

Jacob looked back out into the open square. “Have you met your quota? Have you been irresponsible enough?”

“To last a lifetime.”

“I don’t know. People had expectations.”

“I never live up to expectations. That’s my charm.”

“May I ask,” said Annie, “why you thought it would be easier?”

“In Prague, it takes willpower not to see her, and in Krakow it doesn’t. Now I miss her
and
I miss the struggle to not go see her.”

“I see, yes.”

“There’s nothing in the way. Nothing in me in the way.”

“But if you’re going home,” Annie suggested.

“Oh, that’s in the way.”

“I don’t see why,” Jacob objected. He didn’t want them to talk about the problem too solemnly. “According to your own theory, it shouldn’t matter what comes next.”

Annie frowned. “What theory is this?”

“This idea that I had,” Carl replied. “That the meaning of a relationship can’t come from anything but the experience of it. That it only exists in the present tense.”

“Independent of consequences,” Jacob contributed.

“Mmm.”

“The problem is that in the present you do think about the future,” Carl said. “You even care about it. For example, I want to try not to
ask
Melinda to see me again.” His tone suggested that he didn’t necessarily take his pose of sacrifice at face value; he left open the possibility that he thought it was a sophisticated mistake. “Maybe what comes next wouldn’t have mattered two months ago,” he continued. “When I thought I had come to Europe to sow my wild oats or whatever. Before I knew her. Or any of you. Before I got to know Rafe, for god’s sake.”

“I see,” Jacob said.

“It would be different if I could say, ‘Come back with me to New York, where I work as an investment banker and live in a loft and can take you to the opera every week.’”

“That would be so violent,” Jacob said.

“But I wouldn’t sense that, if I were that person.”

“You’re a person who’s open to sensing things,” said Jacob.

“That’s a generous way of putting it. And I’m going back to a room in Somerville and a part-time job as an English teacher.”

“If you look at it that way, all of us here are nothing.”

“But not
while
you’re here, is the thing,” Carl said.

They sipped their sour coffees. Wind beat on the canvas of the parasol above them, so that the pole and metal table trembled and the cups shivered in their saucers. Jacob wanted to believe that he was staying for some purpose other than mere postponement—for some reason other than a reluctance to face up to what his native country would allow him to be. He accepted that he was losing time. He might never catch up, but maybe the delay itself was somehow a part of who he was going to be.

“You sort of have to go to Auschwitz without thinking about it ahead of time, don’t you,” Carl said, thinking back to the day before. “Otherwise no one would ever go.”

“I wanted to know what it was like,” said Annie. “One goes to cemeteries, after all.”

Sun glare was whitening the flagstones of the plaza. Carl was the first to remark on a crowd that seemed to be forming. “Is something going on?” he asked.

Young people were gathering in the square in twos and threes, not in any organized way and not in any great density. It would scarcely have been noticeable except that here and there a person was dressed a little oddly.

“Is that a—?” Jacob began but let his question falter because he couldn’t think of a name for the costume he was looking at. The man he had noticed was wearing too many clothes, a few too many of which were decorative rather than practical—a scarf, a bandanna, a vest, some kind of leggings—but it was hard to say what the ensemble was intended to represent, if anything. Excess? Then Jacob saw a more identifiable outfit: “I think that man there is in drag.”

With some reluctance Annie too turned in her chair to see.

“Can we go look?” Jacob asked.

They asked in German for their bill—their Czech was sometimes mistaken for Russian, and English wasn’t understood—and left the café by stepping over a low rope into the square at large.

Annie lowered her sunglasses like a visor. Carl raised his rangefinder to his eye and as he walked toyed with the aperture ring to measure the light. Jacob by default led the way, though he felt himself to be more pulled than pulling—drawn into the square by discoveries he began to make there. Three young women in black, for example, had sewn gold stripes onto their blouses and had twisted in their hair wires wound with golden yarn. Bees. A man with a Roman nose, inspired perhaps by his nose, had put on a toga, combed his hair down flat like Caesar’s, and then tied small-denomination zlotys, rendered nearly worthless by currency reform, to a rope that he wore for a belt, to the straps of his sandals, and to a wreath that he wore as a laurel, as if the zlotys were ribbons and he were—not Caesar—Diogenes? The man’s friends came up and added zlotys to him. There were pirates. There was a sheik. Jacob’s companions followed so cautiously and so slowly that Jacob from time to time found himself exposed in his admiration, smiling mutely and alone in front of a costumed Pole who seemed aware that he had put himself on display even to tourists yet by a certain disregard communicated that the display was not for any tourist’s sake. Jacob felt a growing wish to establish between himself and the players before him grounds of commonality. He felt, that is, a general love, or anyway a hunger or a lust. But “Take pictures, take more pictures,” his command to Carl, was all he could think to say as an expression of it. There were more than a few men in drag. One with permed hair, mascara, and freckles—the freckles were natural—glanced shyly down over his falsies when he caught Jacob watching him. Three men in ties and fedoras guarded with plastic guns a
white Polish Fiat that they had painted with bullet holes and with the English words
MAFIA
and
PROFESSIONALISTS
. Most of the costumes were not so easy to unriddle. It was perhaps this vagueness of conception that left Annie unimpressed. “Rather loud,” she observed, of a group of boys whose aspect suggested no particular idea. Some who were serving their compulsory military service seemed to be wearing merely their uniforms for the occasion. Others had no costumes at all but only a prop, and one such prop, carried by three men, was a large traditional Communist flag, gold hammer and sickle on a red ground, now evidently a sufficient signifier of irony in itself. Simple drunkenness signified as much for many more. It was a day of carnival, they learned from some other tourists, an annual ritual of the university.

The students began hollering. A man in a peasant’s blouse and a peculiarly shapeless leather hat began to blow a slender antique clarion. No one paid attention to his call, nor did they heed the gestures of a young blond in a black robe and a cardboard miter who with mock solemnity and hauteur began to bless and to direct the crowd. The three bees grabbed hands and began to skip in a line. Other lines soon formed and began to cross through the crowd, zigging and zagging. Soon, too, there were circles, dancing around a piper or just to their own unself-conscious singing.

It was as if the friends had stumbled into a party that they hadn’t been invited to.

A young man with deep-sunk eyes, his plaid flannel shirt half-unbuttoned, wildly drunk and in no disguise, began to march, fury and drunkenness cooperating in him to create a stately pace. He bellowed fiercely as he proceeded, punching first one fist into the air and then the other, sometimes both. At first, as with the trumpeter and the bishop, no one seemed to pay attention, but the rhythm of his steps, because slower, was decisive, and the bees began to trail him, shufflingly. Others in turn unseriously fell in with them. Half a dozen revelers climbed into a jeep, which had been parked on the square in anticipation, and starting its engine, they nosed it into the procession, too. On the back of the jeep was mounted a long white banner that looked at first glance like that of the workers’ movement Solidarity, but instead of the word “
,” the students had painted
in the same iconic, bright red hand-lettering. Yet there was no trace of humor in the eyes of the young
man at the head of the parade. His eyes didn’t even focus. He had merely the all-hailing, impersonal belligerence of a drunk who needs to get into a fight. He trained his menace steadily outward, ahead of him, clearing a path.