Necessary Errors: A Novel (71 page)

The red-and-white packaging was in German, but the photograph on
the box fronts was unmistakable. For camouflage—almost as a decoy—Jacob
first ordered half a dozen
rohlíky
. Then, as politely as he could, he asked if
the miss wouldn’t mind also adding to his order one of those
krabice
there, if they were in fact for sale. They were, she conceded, and within twenty-four
hours he had eaten all of one box’s contents. He bought two more boxes the next
day. He then rationed himself, but not very strictly, and his appetite so alarmed the
shop assistants that one at last asked him, incredulously, what by god he did with so
many
kornfléky
. —I eat them, he admitted giddily. It was like saying he
ate gold.

He was unabashed now. It was what he had learned from Carl and Melinda, he felt, and he thought of himself as carrying the lesson with him under his shirt, in the form of Carl’s pendant. He was still pursuing his original search, but he saw now that he had to go about it with a certain selfishness, which, if pursued purely enough, would turn out to be something more than selfishness in the end, he hoped. The new approach was reinforced by the knowledge that he was going to have to leave Prague by the end of the summer. He had been admitted to graduate school, and he had decided to go. Any pleasure he took, therefore, he was going to have to take with a necessary cruelty, with an implicit farewell, with the foreknowledge that it was only for the moment that he took it at all.

The Žižkovižkov apartment restored to him a solitude like the one he had known before Carl’s arrival. Though the building was much larger than the Stehlíks’—a proper apartment building rather than a villa—he never met anyone on the stairs or in the hallways. He returned to noticing such things as the sound of his own footfalls and the breath of air that cushioned a room when he first walked into it. He noticed the click of the bolt in its latch. If he wanted to, he was free to sit in the bedroom and watch a breeze toss the gauzy curtains quietly against the glass of the folded-open window. He didn’t have to come up with words for any of his thoughts; there was no one to convey them to. The window faced south, and after lunch he sometimes set a chair in front of it and read in the sun, putting his feet up on the radiator, which was quiet by day though it sometimes clanked to life for an hour or two in the evening.

The apartment had a large, old wooden console radio, whose FM dial was orthodoxly limited to the Communist-approved frequencies, a few dozen megahertz lower than those on which Western Europe broadcast, or America for that matter. While Jacob cooked and ate dinner, he left it on, so as to give himself the sound of company. Sometimes, if he wasn’t making any effort to pay attention, patches of the Czech state radio news tumbled comprehensibly into his mind.

He listened from the bathtub, too. On Mondays he always took a bath before dinner, because on Monday at eight p.m. the hot water stopped flowing and didn’t come back on until Thursday at the same hour—a shortcoming that the landlord had disclosed during negotiations but which Jacob hadn’t quite believed in at the time. The neighborhood’s hot water piping was undergoing repair. On weekdays, he rose early in order to have time to boil water, pot after steaming pot of which he poured cautiously into the tub and then diluted from the tap.

As he perched on the edge of his tub one morning, combing the water with his fingers to mix the cool into the hot, and as birdsong peppered the morning air, it occurred to him that he didn’t expect to remember the Žižkovižkov apartment as clearly as the Stehlíks’. He didn’t have the sense that he was memorizing it. The weakness of his attention may have had something to do with the season, late spring, when one begins to forget how rare, in the longer sweep of the year, a pleasant day
actually is and then even to forget to reproach oneself for failing to bear the rarity in mind.

*   *   *

Thom and Henry found a new haunt for the friends, a cavernous hall set deep in the basement of a postwar white marble building, otherwise deserted, at the upper end of Wenceslas Square. The hall had been rented by a square-dancing society, which sold tickets and beer to the general public, and a hand-painted banner across the entrance declared the hall, in English, to be the Country Club. The beer was cheap, the fiddling sharp, and the dancing sweaty. Mostly the friends drank, talked, and smoked at the club’s long tables, though sometimes they rose and jogged around on the sidelines. Now and then Annie was even able to persuade them into a more serious imitation of square dancing, in time to the music and in a simple four-four step. She and Henry hadn’t become a couple, but she retained a hold on him sufficient to oblige him to participate in such experiments, and she had always been able to browbeat Thom and Jacob. In the aftermath of Carl and Melinda’s defection, the boundaries of their circle had loosened, and they were joined on most nights by a few of the shorter-term expatriates who, in Carl’s wake, seemed to be drifting into the city in greater and greater numbers. In the post office one day, Thom recognized a young woman he had known at school—Elinor, who had what the British called ginger hair. Immediately upon Thom’s introduction of her at the Country Club, she was secured by Annie as an ally. Another new regular was Vincent, a young Tory with thick black curls and full lips, whom no one ever seemed to have invited but who insisted on showing up anyway, attracted by the pleasure of inserting himself into the conversation whenever it turned to intellectual matters. To Annie’s disgust, Vincent’s arguments contained frequent and apparently unconscious allusions to his family’s wealth and to the education that had been purchased for him with it. His accent, too, dismayed her, for reasons that Jacob was too American to appreciate: his vowels were boxy and inward, his consonants mildly slurred. Henry was willing to be debated by him, but Thom found him insufferable and Hans called him the class enemy to his face. Jacob, however, quietly supported his presence, with motives he knew to be low. Vincent was a beauty, and his arrogance reminded Jacob of Daniel’s, though it was clumsier—it was nature where Daniel’s was artifice. Jacob’s support
irritated his friends, who regarded it as a lapse in judgment if not taste, but the defections had left Jacob impatient with the compromise he had struck with himself in the fall.

This impatience eventually led him into adventures. He refused to go back to T-Club, but one night, after parting from his friends at the door of the Country Club, he waited until they were out of sight and then walked to Letná, the park around Stalin’s monument where Henry had once reported seeing men cruising. There, in the shadows, Jacob looked into the faces of circling men, as if in search of something. If he was trying out the role of outlaw, it would be wrong to be looking for approval, but before he could unravel this train of thought, he was nodded at by a wiry, birdlike man, who on closer approach proved to have fine hair and delicate features and to be only a few years older than Jacob himself. The man was too well dressed to be Czech, and he admitted in nearly faultless English to having come that morning from Vienna, though properly, he said, he belonged to Malta, since he was a knight of Malta.

“A knight?” Jacob asked. They were half whispering.

“It is a form of rank,” he replied, putting on the sort of modesty that Jacob’s Harvard classmates had used when telling outsiders that they went to school “in Boston.” “And you are from the great republic. May I?” He interlaced the fingers of one of his hands with those of Jacob’s and playfully pulled Jacob toward him. “I have a great desire to.” They kissed for a while. “Shall we go to where I am staying? It is only a few steps from here.”

It was somewhat more than a few steps, but the knight paid for the taxi. En route he caressed the underside of Jacob’s forearm, invisible to the driver, and cautioned Jacob that they would have to enter the building where he was staying in absolute silence. It wasn’t his apartment. He swore Jacob to secrecy (“you are now on your honor, you understand”) and explained that he had come to Prague on business for the church (which? solemnly: “Rome”). There was an understanding between the church and the knights of Malta, an old alliance against atheism, socialism, and other such forces in the world. Though the Communists had forbidden monastic life, a few heroic men had persevered, even in Prague, and had taken vows and lived in secret accordance with them, unknown to the civil authorities. Did Jacob know of this? The pope himself had granted these men their dispensation; their apartments became their cells. It was to such a cell that Jacob and the
knight were traveling. The church had offered the empty bed of a monk now on a pilgrimage to Rome—a monk’s property, after all, was at his church’s disposal—in consideration of negotiations that the knight was to make in Prague on the church’s behalf. The apartment’s second monk—two lived there—was also scheduled to be away, though only for the night, and to make sure that he was in fact away, it would be more prudent if the knight entered the rooms first alone. It was preferable if Jacob could omit to notice the location of the apartment, and he must promise, if he did take note in spite of himself, never to return. He must never speak to the monks. They were under orders. They were not to know that Jacob had ever visited. Their apartment was, after all, tantamount to a monastery. It was wonderful to have such a place, the knight continued after a momentary pause. He looked very much forward to Jacob’s fucking him there.

“Are
you
a monk?” Jacob asked.

“I am a knight.”

“That’s right,” said Jacob.

They stopped at a gray building across the street from a steep, wooded hill. Wordlessly they climbed to the top floor. The apartment was spare and simple. The knight declined to turn on a light, but on the mantel, a crucifix under glass glowed a delicate electric blue, and by its light and that of the streetlamps outside, Jacob saw that the mantel also held a bottle of water, labeled in Czech script as blessed by the pope; a framed postcard of an Italian painting of the Virgin Mary; a wooden rosary wrapped around a white statuette of Jesus; and a jar of earth, labeled as having come from the Holy Land. A part of Jacob may have felt a little sorry, but another part was happy to be a little brutal. There were twin beds, somewhat austere, and onto one of them the knight pulled Jacob and there unbuckled Jacob’s belt. “Will you make use of this? I want it very badly. Or rather, not it, but what I would like you to use it with.” The condom proved troublesome afterward, when Jacob thoughtlessly flushed it, causing the knight to worry that it might stop up the plumbing and be discovered during repair. His concern was so vivid as to suggest it might have happened to him once before. “It is not for me that I fear, but there should not be questions for the monks.”

Thus ended Jacob’s half year of abstinence. After breakfast, the two walked around downtown while the knight indicated buildings that the
church intended to reclaim. “Do you see that rectory? In any case it will soon be a rectory again. I am speaking to a member of Parliament about it tonight.” The knight’s other hobby horse in conversation was the freemasonry, as it were, of nobles, which he extravagantly praised. Crossing
, he became excited upon recognizing two tall, middle-aged German tourists, whom he identified as a count and an earl. “Now you will
see,
” the knight whispered to Jacob. When hailed, the Germans, polite and cautious, spoke in English as a courtesy to Jacob, whose presence the knight left unexplained. The men showed no sign of knowing that they belonged to a secret club that ruled the world. “They didn’t say anything about it,” Jacob commented after the tourists had parted from them.

“Ah, but they wouldn’t. They needn’t, you see. We recognize one another.”

“It’s like being gay.”

“Not at all.”

“You have a society right under the noses of a society that doesn’t see you.”

“But it’s very different. The matter is entirely different.”

It occurred to Jacob that the Germans’ courtesy might have been the sort extended to an acquaintance known to be harmless but delusional. By midafternoon, as the knight’s supposed appointments with government officials approached, Jacob found himself exhausted, and it was a relief that the knight’s instructions for a reunion in Vienna (“It will be pointless to ask for me by name at this address. Ask the housekeeper rather for the gentleman visiting in the rooms of the lawyer Detlev Bachofen; I am always to be found in his rooms on Thursdays at five o’clock. We shall have a whole evening together of delightful fucking”) were too cloak-and-dagger to bother remembering, though the fiction of a future rendezvous did make the moment of farewell carefree.