Necessary Errors: A Novel (67 page)

“In America we don’t take off our shoes indoors.”

“In Czech, yes. In Czech nation, no shoes.”

“I’ll take them off if it’s important to you. If I could borrow your vacuum cleaner…,” Jacob proposed, but Mr. Stehlík didn’t seem to recognize the word for the device and moved impatiently to his last and gravest charge.

“And Mr. Jacob, is not hotel.” He glared at Jacob after delivering the words. His face was ashen with rage.

“We were out with some friends,” Jacob said as pleasantly as he could, “and one of them lives on the other side of town, so it was easier for her to stay over here.”

“Is not hotel!” Mr. Stehlík shouted.

Mr. Stehlík was a powerful man, in the prime of his life. Jacob’s heart thudded effortfully, thickly. What he could see of the world shrank to just Mr. Stehlík at the center. Mr. Stehlík was a man accustomed to punishing, but Jacob had come out of that box and did not want to go back into it. What’s more, Jacob was innocent. He had on his side the counterposing fury of innocence.

“What’s going on?” asked Carl, who had come quietly in from his room.

Mr. Stehlík ignored him. “You are my guest, Mr. Jacob. Mr. Carl is your guest and my guest. But is not hotel. No.”

“Oh, I see,” said Carl.

“Is
dirty
, Mr. Carl,” Mr. Stehlík said, pointing to the stovetop again.

“So I heard,” said Carl. “Mouses will come.”

Jacob wished Carl hadn’t taken the risk of being detected in mockery. “It’s normal to have guests,” Jacob said. “It’s part of living somewhere.”

“Not in my house. One, two. No more.”

It occurred to Jacob that Mr. Stehlík might not know that he was supposed to be charging for wear and tear. “Maybe we’re still not paying you enough,” Jacob suggested. “Under capitalism the rent is supposed to be high enough that the landlord can afford to repair the damage that happens in normal use.”

Mr. Stehlík stepped forward. “Is not money,” he said quietly in Jacob’s face, so close that Jacob winced at his stale smoker’s breath. “Is
my house
.”

Jacob remembered, in what did not at first seem to be a consecutive thought, the ski bags that had held
grandparents. He recalled the strangeness of their presence by the driveway.

Carl was to go to Henry’s the next day, anyway. Jacob himself could stay at the
, if he had to. But he probably wouldn’t have to. There was a market for Prague apartments now. And in the interim maybe he, too, could stay with Henry.

“Fine,” Jacob said, turning away from Mr. Stehlík coldly. “We will leave.”

“Pardon?” Mr. Stehlík asked. “You do not need leave.”

“But I don’t want to stay,” Jacob said. “We will leave within twenty-four hours.” He felt a princely autonomy. He left Mr. Stehlík behind in the kitchen and went to his bedroom to begin packing.

*   *   *

Jacob opened the doubled set of windows in his bedroom. A drizzle was falling, and above the concrete barriers across the street, he could see heavy clouds traveling east, toward the Stehlíks’ house, and breaking up, as they approached, to reveal ribs of blue as they passed over it.

While Jacob was fussing with the zippers and compartments of his backpack, Carl came in and sat on the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” Carl offered.

Jacob shrugged and kept fussing. “I would guess it’s a puritanical thing, but there are nudie pictures in the bathroom upstairs,” he observed.

“But Honza had to get married, didn’t he.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You have to find a new place,” Carl insisted.

Jacob shrugged again. He cared only that he would soon be without the kindness that when he looked up he saw in Carl’s face. “It’s just a gorilla problem,” Jacob said.

Jacob showed up with Carl on Henry’s doorstep, his Olivetti and a backpack full of clothes already in tow. Henry welcomed him despite not having invited him, as Jacob had known he would. There was only one sofa in Henry’s living room, Henry apologized, but there was room for a second sleeping bag on the floor. Jacob promised to move into the cafá on Na
, for the private English lessons that he was giving to her and her friend. In her absence he was hailed, as he left the Stehlíks’ villa, by her mother, who was hanging wet laundry on the white rubberized cords strung across the family’s small yard.

“Kubo,” Mrs. Stehlíková said, placing a damp shirt over one shoulder so that her hands were free to mime the meaning of her words, “já mám velké srdce.” With her index fingers she traced in the air before her the symmetrical outline of the large heart that she was explaining that she had, then patted her bosom. She nodded. “Rozumíš?” Do you understand?

—Thank you, Jacob said. —Until the next sighting.

As a temporary home for Václav, Henry lent Jacob a steel tureen with a lid, though he warned that he would have to borrow it back if they should decide to boil spaghetti. Improvisation seemed to be the theme of Henry’s housekeeping. On their first night, Carl and Jacob had to shift piles of laundry and stacks of paperbacks in order to make room for their sleeping bags, and there was no sense that any item in the kitchen belonged in one place rather than another—flour, bowls, sardine tins, tea, frying pans, drinking glasses, salt, potatoes, and Marmite mixed in perfect democracy on the shelves and countertops. Jacob fell nonetheless a little bit in love with being Henry’s guest. Henry had
assembled more than a dozen different spices, whose Czech names Jacob had not seen often enough to learn, and Jacob went through them, uncapping and sniffing to educate himself. Henry also made Jacob welcome to his washing machine, and since Jacob didn’t know when he might next find one, he washed everything he owned, strewing the apartment with wet clothes, laying socks across sills, draping pants over chair backs, and hooking shirts over doorknobs and window levers. Before falling asleep at night, he read at random from Henry’s paperbacks.
Maumauing the Flak-Catchers. The Road to Wigan Pier.
In the shower one morning, he even tried Henry’s shampoo, surreptitiously.

With Henry personally, Jacob was a little stiff, though Henry, for his part, seemed at ease. He may even have welcomed the distraction that Jacob’s presence made. He had, after all, been expecting the company of Carl, but Carl didn’t show up until Sunday night. Upon overhearing Melinda’s news, a Czech woman who taught at the language school had lent her the key to her Prague apartment, which she didn’t need because she was headed to a friend’s
chata
in the country for the weekend. Not knowing she had gone home with Carl, not seeing her Friday morning or afternoon, Rafe had developed the hope that she suffered as much from the separation as he did and had convinced himself that he might be able to persuade her to accept a year or two in Kazakhstan if he promised to look for a desk in Berlin or Paris afterward. When she disillusioned him, he turned stoic, uncharacteristically businesslike, or so Melinda later described him to Carl. He wished her the best; he didn’t want to hear any details. She began to cry and apologized for crying, saying she knew it was unfair for her to be the one to cry. Rafe agreed that it was unfair, but “for old times’ sake,” he said, he was willing to tell her that he thought she would be all right. Then he asked her to leave.

On Monday, Melinda moved to the apartment of another colleague, who was willing to let Melinda sleep on her sofa. Melinda was resisting Annie’s attempts to install her at the
. She was spending as much time with Carl as she could manage to. After the weekend, the two passed their hours together in cafés and museums, since they had no other privacy, but it was what they were used to. Annie reported this news while signing Jacob up at the
, on Tuesday after work. The
was clean, bright, Brutalist, and very far from anything else, Jacob
discovered—it was at the southern end of the longest subway line. He left without a key because one did not carry a key out of the building but rather traded it at the front desk for a card in a cellophane sleeve with one’s name and room number and an official stamp. On the tedious subway ride back to Henry’s, Jacob stared at his name, handwritten on the card in blue ink. He would stay at the
if he had to, he promised himself; he wouldn’t impose on Henry past Friday, the day of Carl’s departure. But he didn’t think it would come to that. He had been asking his students to let him know if they heard of any apartments.