Necessary Errors: A Novel (64 page)

He led the procession toward the north entrance of the great market hall. No clear distinction separated the parade from the crowd admiring it. One drew from the other—drew the other into it. So the friends, too, followed the leader of the parade.

“We’re going inside,” Jacob said as they approached the hall. It delighted him.

“Should we?” Annie asked.

As they passed under the arch of the doorway, the chants of the students began to gather and echo in the round vaults of the ceiling and the alcoves along the hall’s long gallery. Having left the sunlight, they were blind for a few moments, and had for sensation only the echoes and the feel of staggering and jostling. As their eyes adjusted, the hall itself appeared: the ceilings painted with the emblems and heraldic crests of the city; gilt chandeliers, whose shape uncannily but not quite identifiably suggested an animal growth of bone or horn; and, obscured by the marchers themselves, the stalls of vendors, whose cheap goods, the usual off-brand Western cosmetics, English-language workbooks printed in China, and flimsy leather belts and purses, had disappointed the friends on a visit two days prior. They were harrowing the temple, Jacob thought. Was the word “harrowing” or “hallowing”? He couldn’t remember. He turned to check on his friends and saw that Annie was slouching defensively.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Brilliant, thanks.”

The light, as they emerged by the southern doors, washed out the sky, and the roar of the crowd, escaping the hall’s confines, changed pitch, the way the roar in a whelk’s shell rises and clarifies as you turn it away from your ear.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Would you please not ask me that so often?”

Carl trotted ahead so as to have a shot of the parade as it exited the market hall. Inside there hadn’t been enough light to take pictures, but in the closeness he had caught some of the crowd’s enthusiasm.

The parade left the great square by a southern street. Jacob and Annie trailed it on the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Jacob said to Annie, when Carl had abandoned the two of them on one of his documentary missions.

“Yesterday?”

The parade had thinned as it stretched along the street, and in slow cycles it shouted to and was hailed by an audience lining the street.

“I wasn’t ready to see it, but—”

“Gah, no,” she cut him off. “It isn’t that.”

“You
are
angry, then.”

She wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Don’t encourage him,” she said, after a pause. “Don’t encourage him to break her heart.”

He heard for a moment the coarseness of the cheering around them. “But if it’s what they both want,” Jacob tried to answer.

“He doesn’t want it for her.”

“If he can’t stay, he can’t stay.”

“That’s no reason.” Briefly she challenged him with her gaze but then looked away.

The parade turned west, toward the river. It passed one of the seminaries, where a couple of young men with unwashed hair were leaning out of adjacent windows in an upper story to watch. —Come down! a parader shouted, in Polish words that resembled Czech closely enough for Jacob to understand. Others echoed the call, and soon the crowd was roaring: —Come down! Come with us! The two men in the window glanced at each other with guilty happiness. One retreated, but the other waved back to the crowd sheepishly, amicably. Jacob nudged Carl, but when Carl raised his camera, the remaining boy, too, ducked, and there were only the empty windows and a flapping white shade.

*   *   *

“We thought perhaps Thursday night,” Melinda let Jacob know, when he saw her in the teacher’s lounge upon their return. “In a place with the absurd name of the Love Bar, which Rafe reports is quite
sympatický
. Just south of the Charles Bridge, on the embankment itself. On the water, really.”

“Which side?”

“This side. Our side.”

Jacob liked being back even more than he had liked being away. He liked living in a world where the occasion didn’t have to be named. He liked the sense of order according to which it fell to Mel and Rafe to make such appointments.

This world and this order Carl was due to leave in a week and a half, a few days after the new month. Henry was going to host him for those last few days, so Carl wouldn’t have to spend a whole month’s rent on them.
had confirmed that her family was willing to take back Carl’s room on the first. So Carl never quite unpacked when they got back from Krakow. He lived out of his suitcase.

Was it just because of the rent? In American terms, it was a negligible sum. Was Carl, though he had come to Prague as Jacob’s friend, leaving as Henry’s? Maybe there had been moments when Jacob, despite his caution, had come too close. Carl was so gentle he would never have let Jacob become aware of such moments, if there had been any. The doubt was in his mind the morning he found Carl cropping off handfuls of his beard in the bathroom. “Getting ready for America?” Jacob asked.

“I hadn’t thought of America,” Carl confessed. “Sure, for America.”

Jacob didn’t try to go behind Carl’s irony. Later, shaved and dressed, Carl said, as he rubbed his chin during breakfast, “It’s weird. It’s like that game Dead Man’s Hand. The nerves feel wrong. Did you ever play that?”

His cheeks were pale from having been hidden from the sun. There was something in the alteration that collapsed the past three and a half months. The revealed face was vulnerable, unfamiliar, and handsome, and it added to the friends’ unease with each other, as did their speculations about the Stehlíks’ plans for Carl’s room after he was gone. Between that room and Honza’s quarters lay another room still uncleared of junk, so there was a chance that nothing would be done with Carl’s room right away.

For the interval, what sense of home the friends had was to be found only in the arrangements of their wider circle—in the welcome that they knew they could look forward to from the others and in the intuitive way it was planned. On Thursday night, as they walked toward their appointment along the crooked familiar path through the Old Town,
cutting through the alleys and
pasáže
that they now knew by instinct, past the church with broken windows, past the music store that never opened, they felt as if they were returning to something, a tradition of some kind that they had long ago been admitted to, something whose form was like a seminar or a court, where a role was defined by growing into it. A few hours before, Carl, after asking Jacob to teach him the words for “short” and “shorter,” had gone and had his hair cut, and the effect of it had resolved the novelty of his beardlessness. He was suddenly again the old image of Carl that Jacob found that his mind’s eye had never in fact surrendered. He was who Jacob had always known he was. Everything was going to be all right, Jacob felt, even if Carl really did leave, as it seemed he was going to.

They came out to the river at the Charles Bridge and turned left, passing under an arch and then along a hoarding, both of which blocked their view. Unable to see, they were briefly seized by the characteristic Prague anxiety of never finding the entrance—of arriving at one’s goal but remaining blocked from it by a wall of stone on account of having overlooked an alley or a medieval door a few dozen yards back, which had served as the approach so immemorially that no one any longer marked or described it. They doubled back to the Charles Bridge in premature retreat; then, giving up on this retreat, proceeded once more under the arch and along the hoarding, until, at the end of the hoarding, their eyes tumbled down steps to the right, into a spit of land that angled into the river. Here they were. They descended, and as they did, left behind the blare of the city at dusk for the placidity of the water, black and quiet, which was wrinkling and smoothing itself below them at the base of the blocks of carved white stone upon which they walked.

From the end of the spit, at its corner, a weir ran out. Water passed over it so evenly and silently that it was possible to imagine walking the stone barrier all the way across the river.

“In here, I think.” Carl had found the door.

The first room was shallow, crowded, and harshly lit. It was dominated by a bar with a glass top and brass trim. In a corner, in an entente that shut out the loud and busy drinkers around them, stood Melinda, Rafe, and Henry.

It was the fluster in the room, probably, that prevented Henry and the couple from responding as warmly as Carl and Jacob had expected them to. Their greetings were so quiet that Rafe at last broke out, “The boys don’t get kisses? Shall I kiss them?”

“If you like,” Melinda licensed him.

“I don’t like,” he told her, and then continued, addressing the new arrivals, “but you don’t mind, do you? If you can do without
hers…
”

“Don’t,” she cautioned him.

“I don’t, I don’t,” he answered. “I never do.”

“How was Poland?” Henry asked.

“That’s right,” Rafe joined him. “Your expedition.”

Carl abruptly excused himself to get beers for himself and Jacob. Melinda followed him to the bar with her gaze.

“It was good,” Jacob answered. He wanted to delay answering in detail until his fellow travelers were at his side, so he tried to deflect the question. “I heard you might go farther east yourself.”

“Poland isn’t very ‘east,’” Rafe pointed out.

“It’s sort of farther ‘west,’ isn’t it,” Jacob admitted.

“I understood it to lie to the north,” Rafe said, to finish off the joke. Then, neutrally, “No, we don’t have to worry about Poland any more.”

“So are you going east?” Jacob repeated his inquiry.

“It depends.”

“What does it depend on?”

Rafe leaned into his girlfriend, and when she startled, he pretended to have done so by accident. “On her,” he said, with a nod of his head.

“No,” Melinda simply said.

“In a way,” said Rafe.

“Oh, that way,” Melinda agreed.

“What way is that?” Jacob asked.

“If I can’t make up my mind,” Melinda explained, “he’ll put it off a little longer.”

“An offer came through,” Henry said. “For Kazakhstan. Land of the Cossacks!”

“Oh, they’re the same word. I didn’t realize that.”

“But different people, actually. It’s a Turkish word, it turns out,” Rafe elaborated. “It means ‘bohemian.’”

“No,” it was now Jacob’s turn to say.

“Well, it means ‘rover.’ The tribe who do not settle down.”

“Your tribe, in other words.”

“But Melinda’s not excited for some reason.”

“Do they have running hot water in Kazakhstan?” Jacob asked.

“Sometimes,” Rafe replied, as if that were as often as anyone had a right to wish for. He had the excitement of a boy looking forward to a math test that has scared all the other boys, not because he’s better at math but because he’s better at thinking while scared.

“Why can’t you save the world from an office in Paris?” asked Jacob.

“But I don’t save the world. I complicate it. Paris doesn’t need any help in that department.”

“I tried,” Jacob told Melinda.

“You tried valiantly,” Melinda agreed.

“You should come, too. You’d love Almaty in the spring. The scent of acetyls and aldehydes in the air—”

“Have you heard the news?” Melinda interrupted.

“What news is that?” Jacob asked.

“Thom and Jana’s.”

“No.”

“They’re to have a sprout,” Melinda revealed.

“So first you have a snog, and it leads to a scrum, and you end up with a sprout.”

“That’s the giniral idear, luv.”

“You do a terrible Cockney accent, for an Englishwoman,” Rafe told Melinda. “Do you know that?”

“It’s better than my cowboy. Jacob positively shudders when I do my cowboy.”

“Are they getting married?” Jacob asked.

“Provisionally,” said Melinda.

“To make sure the child has dual citizenship,” Henry explained. “They’re here, you know.”

“Where?”

“There’s another room,” Melinda said. “It’s sort of—well, you’ll see. And Annie and Kaspar as well. Shall we go in to them?”

She took Jacob’s arm and pointed him to an open door at the far end of the bar, across from where they had come in. She held him tightly enough to oblige him to walk slowly, to match the rhythm of her smaller,
more leisurely steps. It was a ritual of the court, Jacob thought, that Melinda was the first to proceed. Rafe naturally took up the end of the train.

They passed into a short corridor. “I wish that I had gone to Krakow,” Melinda confided, leaning into Jacob, “and that you and he had stayed here.”

“Why?”

“Because then I would have that look in
my
eyes. That look of having gotten away.”

They emerged into the back of a small auditorium. The stage was dark and the chandeliers were dim, but from low sconces a yellow blur fell discreetly into the aisles, as if for latecomers who still had a few moments to find their way to their seats. It reminded Jacob that in the world outside, the sun had gone down for the night. Men and women leaned against the walls in conversation, or took up clusters of seats, standing or sitting crosswise on armrests so as to be able to look at one another rather than at the stage where nothing was taking place. Jacob and Melinda walked slowly down the ramp of the stage-left aisle, scanning the rows for their friends. Because the stalls obliged most people to face forward, and because of the obscure light, Jacob and Melinda had nearly reached the stage before they spotted Thom, in the front row. He had turned in his seat so as to be able to address Kaspar, who was sitting one row behind Thom, Jana, and Annie.