Necessary Errors: A Novel (70 page)

Jacob was drunk enough that it wasn’t until he was halfway through sharing his analogy that it occurred to him that it could be considered disparaging to Kaspar—that Jacob might seem to be calling Kaspar sentimental or childish or even unprincipled—but he was too far along to stop and he stammered on to the end of his idea.

“The llama problem,” Carl named it. He and the others had leaned in, to hear Jacob’s explication to Kaspar.

“But can capitalism and communism be llamas?” Melinda objected. “Aren’t they rather ways of feeding llamas?”

“So it’s meta,” Carl said. “It’s postmodern.”

“Oh dear,” Melinda worried.

“I would say…,” Kaspar began. He paused to drum the fingers of one hand against his lips. He hadn’t taken offense; Jacob’s story seemed if anything to have pleased him. “I would say, why shouldn’t how a child feels be the way to decide?”

“The llama Communism himself has a touch of mystery on his hands at the moment, it would seem,” Thom alerted them. Hans, they saw, was kissing one of the women he had been talking to.

“That’s a llama of another color.”

“Quite a few llamas of that color of late,” said Thom. “How is it you have been spared the darts of Cupid, Jacob, I have sometimes wondered?”

“I had a boyfriend for a little while,” Jacob answered.

“I’m sorry? Did anyone else hear him say he had a boyfriend?” He thought Jacob was joking.

The friends waited.

“Don’t be such an eejit,” Annie said.

“
Is
that what he said?” Thom asked again, beginning to be confused. He looked to Jacob. “Are you gay then?” The word sounded unfamiliar in Thom’s brogue, and Thom seemed unaccustomed to it.

Jacob nodded.

“Goodness.” Thom took two swigs from his bottle. “And you all
know. How long have you known, then?” No one answered him. “Nobody tells me fuck all, do they. And me yammering on about poofters and thespians. How could you let me?” He took another swig. “I’ve never been so ashamed in me life.”

“As well you should be,” Annie said.

“That makes me feel much better.”

“I didn’t care about those words,” said Jacob. “They’re funny words.”

“You might have dropped us a hint.”

“Maybe he did drop one and you were too much of an eejit to pick it up, unlike the rest of us.”

“You let me say such things,” Thom said. “I have no choice now but to drown my sorrows.”

“I can’t stand in your way.”

“I wouldn’t, sir, after the way you have behaved yourself. Anyone else need another?”

“You
could
perhaps have told him sooner,” Annie said, after Thom had gone to fetch the next round.

“I should have,” Jacob agreed happily. Now there were no more secrets, or anyway no more that Jacob could tell.

*   *   *

By midnight they were dancing in Henry’s living room, jostling one another in the course of their movements as if by accident. The boom box had been turned up several times and was blaring as loud as it could, with a monotonous, rhythmic force. They had by this time heard the tape through twice, complained that they were bored of it, tried another, and in the end returned to it for lack of a satisfactory alternative—forced to recognize that it was their music for the night.

“I have quite nice shoulders,” Annie asserted, over the din, while dancing next to Jacob.

“You do,” Jacob agreed.

“Henry complimented me on them.”

“Did he,” Jacob acknowledged.

There was a sharpness and a greediness in her boast that Jacob took for a sign of health. They were, as a group, going to act tonight with less caution and less solicitude toward one another than usual, he thought. They were going to take risks. They were losing one another anyway, and they were healthy. They could dance with this violence all night if they
wanted to, on the fuel of youth, Prazdroj, and
. The Czech women wanted to prove that their zest matched any Westerner’s; Thom, that for his friends he could trample down any awkwardness. Hans was sedulously giving the Czech women’s energy a lascivious turn, Annie glowed with Henry’s new interest in her, and Henry himself, bent at the waist, his curls sweaty, his wide eyes vacant as he concentrated on his dancing, had the vigor and wildness of a faun. Only Carl and Melinda danced in the old, tender style.

“Pardon,” Jacob heard. Kaspar was touching his arm. Kaspar was too ill to share a selfish pleasure like dancing.

“Yes?” Jacob said. He cupped his ear but didn’t stop his feet at first.

“I am leaving,” Kaspar said. “I am curious, if we shall meet again.”

Jacob felt obliged to stop dancing. “Sure, we’ll see each other around,” he said. He backed Kaspar up into the cold light of the vestibule, where it was a little quieter.

Kaspar looked into Jacob’s face shyly but searchingly, as if he thought Jacob were keeping something there hidden from both of them. “But without Melinda…,” Kaspar suggested.

Tomorrow there would no longer be an apartment in Prague where Kaspar could rely on finding a bath and a plate of sausages and caraway-seed bread if he dropped in uninvited. It now seemed almost cruel of Melinda to have fostered Kaspar so generously, as if she had stocked a bird feeder with seed in November, December, and January but now it was February and moving away she had left it empty. He was an adult, but she had indulged his childishness, and he had repaid her with a readiness to believe that one could follow one’s heart by the simple expedient of listening to it.

“We have to give her up,” said Jacob.

“It is so,” Kaspar agreed.

Jacob felt he hadn’t yet been brutal enough. “We have to give up the whole idea,” Jacob tried again, telling himself that his cruelty was for Kaspar’s sake. “They’re going to find out the hard way.”

“Who?”

“Carl and Melinda,” Jacob answered in a whisper, not wanting them to overhear.

“Ah, do you feel that?” Kaspar was studying Jacob with a look of concern.

Jacob tried to think of a way to explain that Carl and Melinda had chosen to break the old forms; they had chosen the new way; and therefore they had to expect that the new way would try to break them. It was a mistake to think that in the new world they would be able to care in the old way. In the new world you had to find something of value and learn not to care for it. You had to learn how to sell it.

“Are you distressed, Kuba?” Kaspar asked.

Jacob shut himself up. “No. I thought you might be.”

“I am sad,” Kaspar answered. “As I say, I would like to meet you again. Have you a telephone?”

“Not any more. Do you have one?”

“No.” Kaspar chuckled softly at this dead end.

“We could leave notes at the language school,” Jacob suggested.

“Yes, that is so,” Kaspar replied, but he didn’t seem to believe that Jacob would.

“I could stop by your place,” Jacob offered. Jacob’s new apartment was located just on the other side of the war cemeteries from Kaspar’s.

“I hope that you will,” Kaspar said. He took a deep breath, met Jacob’s eye, and then looked past him for a moment into the party that Jacob was about to return to. He smiled finally in farewell. “So, okay,” he said awkwardly, and was gone.

“I need a beer,” said Carl, coming up behind Jacob.

Jacob followed him and took a beer, too. Carl’s shirt, like Jacob’s, was patchy with sweat from dancing. A breeze came through the open window behind Henry’s refrigerator and played on them.

“This won’t cost five crowns in Rome,” said Carl.

“No,” agreed Jacob.

“I wanted to be the one to tell you, you know,” Carl confessed. “I said I’d known you longer. But Melinda said she’d known you longer in Prague and that that was what mattered.”

Jacob shrugged away the implication that the case was a delicate one.

After a swig of beer, Carl continued: “We’re leaving in a few minutes, you know.”

“You are?” Jacob said stupidly.

“Hans invited Jitka to go home with him, so Jitka is offering us her apartment again for tonight.”

Jacob nodded. The glass of the kitchen window behind Carl was dusty, and the dust caught and held a moonish glare thrown up by lights in the courtyard below. He and Carl would never live together again, not in Prague, Somerville, or anywhere else.

“I understand,” said Jacob. This was as close as the two of them would ever be, so he looked at Carl carefully—at his ironic eyes and candid mouth. Carl looked the same but not the same as he always had, as if he were older or younger than he had been the last time Jacob had really looked at him. He was in the flow of time now. He was in a story.

“I’ll probably blow it,” Carl said, “but I’d never in a million years feel I had a right to a chance with Melinda even if I did know what I was doing with my life, so not knowing doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to hold back.”

“It’ll work out,” said Jacob, trying to match Carl’s prosaic tone, and suddenly ashamed of the discouragement that he had tried to convey to Kaspar.

Blinking his eyes, Carl pulled his steel-bead chain out from under his shirt and over his head. He wiped dry the metal pendant on the front of his pants. “I was going to give you this.”

Jacob let Carl place the saint in his palm. It was still warm. “But you’re still traveling,” Jacob protested.

“In a way.”

“Italy’s not traveling?”

“Do you want it or not?

“Of course I want it,” Jacob said.

“Okay, then.”

He could have kissed Carl, but the point, he made himself remember, was that Carl was the one he didn’t kiss. He slipped the chain over his own head.

“I don’t have one to give you in return.”

“That’s okay.”

“Do you want Václav?”

“Hamsters, Italy—doesn’t seem right somehow.”

Václav remained silent and hidden nearby, inside his soup tureen, which had been placed in a cabinet for safekeeping during the party.

In the event, Carl and Melinda stayed for another two hours, at which point, after a fluster of tears and hugs, they fled.

*   *   *

Annie cried on the sofa and accused anyone who tried to console her of not caring as much as she did. The rest returned to drinking and dancing. They seemed to grow almost angry in their revelry.

“Tonight is the last night,” Jacob told Henry. “After this we can’t live just for living.”

“Then we’re animals,” suggested Henry.

“Animals who eat story.”

“But we’re also the meat,” said Henry. Carl in leaving had taken with him their philosophy, and it was as if Henry and Jacob were casting about for a topic of conversation that Carl though absent might somehow still be taking part in. “We’re meat with cinema,” Henry said. Jacob’s skin prickled. It was a naming like one of Carl’s, the kind of understanding that they had been afraid of losing when they lost him. Henry repeated the words. Then he repeated them again and then kept repeating them, as if he were chanting. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. Meat with cinema. The words lost their meaning, as if he were unlocking and emptying them. The words became unfamiliar and abstract, and in this state they could have meant anything, and because of their purity, and because they were being consumed by the saying of them, they began, Jacob noticed with alarm, to seem to mean everything—to mean every aspect of the experience that Jacob was living through. He really was meat with cinema, and so was Henry. It was what they all were. Henry seized Jacob by the arms, and the two of them fell down together, Henry taking most of the blow, but one of Jacob’s elbows flowering in pain, though the pain seemed to be happening to another person. As they fell, Jacob thought:
Oh, this is silly and grandiose, and I would never be so taken with it if I weren’t drunk and Henry weren’t my friend, but I am and he is and I understand what he means.
His meaning, which he didn’t speak—Jacob intuited it as if a language teacher had acted it out instead of translating it—was that the two of them weren’t in fact falling; they were merely disregarding the world; the accident and pain were incidental to the establishment of an axis between them that was, for the moment, distinct from the world’s and untethered from it, drifting separately. For the moment they were taking
a path of their own, and if the floor of the apartment happened to fall up and hit them while Henry was shouting his communication, while he was trying to persuade Jacob to hear it, to really hear what he was trying to say, then it was no more than a sign of the reality of their independence. The pain in Jacob’s elbow seemed far away; the only sensations near him were the words, the repeated words, Henry trembling as he shouted them, Jacob crouching and wincing against them almost in Henry’s arms. This was abandonment, Jacob thought, this feeling right now; this was what it felt like to be cut free.

Oh, that valley was white with cherry blossoms everywhere. White and green, it was, with cherry blossoms and green, green grass. And through all that green and white, the river flowed like a silver ribbon. Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before?

—Astrid Lindgren

In a new private bakery, a block from where Jacob’s new tram let him off, he discovered cornflakes. Noticing a line in front of the bakery, he fell into it without knowing what it was for. The interior of the shop was trimmed with oak instead of the usual marbled white plastic. Wire baskets held golden loaves and batons; crumbs littered a blue tile floor. The cornflakes were on a high shelf behind the counter, facing out, ranged in a row like a boast.