Necessary Errors: A Novel (74 page)

“They’re this way,” she said, once they came to the water. “Just a few meters on, I believe.”

Below, flashing with reflection, dimples scissored themselves in and out of existence.

“Have you been in one yourself yet?” Jacob asked.

“That’s just it. What if I were to fall in? Do you think the Czechs would rescue me?”

“You think I will?”

“Oh, you’re the sort. Though you might be quite tiresome about it after. Come to think of it I expect you would be.”

“I fell into the Charles once,” he remembered.

“You
can
swim, then.”

“It wasn’t over my head, where I fell in. Just to my knees.”

A gangway of whitewashed plywood rested on the stone wall that hemmed the river. With the swell of the river the gangway very gently seesawed, rising and falling like a sleeper’s torso. Annie and Jacob walked down it to a moored barge. A second gangway led them down to a floating dock. Half a dozen skiffs were lashed to its sides.

They were welcomed somewhat skeptically. Jacob had to promise the man in charge that they knew how to row before the man was willing to take twenty crowns, untie a skiff, and hand Jacob its painter. Annie clambered into the stern. When Jacob followed, the boat swiveled dangerously until he realized he should crouch down. Seated facing her, he drew the oars up from between his legs. Once he had figured out how to hold them, he set the tip of one oar’s blade against the little dock and shoved them off.

They drifted for a moment. The nose of the skiff had been pointed upriver, toward the Charles Bridge to the south, but the current soon caught the nose and the skiff yawed clockwise, into the middle of the river, until Jacob, realizing that he now had enough sea-room to swing the oars freely, pulled on them and righted the skiff so that it once more stemmed the stream.

Effortfully they climbed the river. The bright air around them was silent except for intermittent clumsy splashes that he made with the oars. The rowing took more strength than he had imagined it would. He began, however, to find a rhythm. They were far below the level of the city where they usually walked. The tall, mud-gray stone of the embankment seemed to be sheltering them.

“It’s quite lovely, isn’t it,” said Annie. “I knew it would be.” She brushed the hair from her forehead and blinked her eyes shut for a moment in the sun, appreciating its warmth.

“How’d you hear about it?”

“Your man Vincent mentioned it. In his way. ‘Rather urban, compared to punting on the Cam, you know.’ Or some such dreadful thing. What is it you fancy about him, anyway? His lips? He does have nice lips.”

“His hair.”

“His curls. I like curls on a man as well. But he’s not worth it, Jacob. He’s not worth putting up with the rest of him. Mind where you’re taking us.”

“I was going to go through.”

“Through? You mean under?”

“There are boats on the other side.” The plain shadow of the Mánes Bridge fell over them, cooling them.

Annie craned her neck to look between the bridge’s piers. “So there are. I hadn’t seen them. I suppose it’s all right then.”

They passed through. The sun returned to them while the broad, slow-sloping stones of the bridge’s underside were still overhead. On the right bank the sun was hitting the bleached faces and orange roofs of Malá Strana’s old riverside palaces.

“Anyway I’m seeing someone again,” Jacob volunteered. “A Czech.”

“Are you, then.”

It was not as easy to tell Annie as it would have been to tell Melinda. Annie resisted hearing confessions. “We’re having a good time,” Jacob continued.

“Am I to congratulate you?”

“I’m just telling you about myself.”

“I suppose I am to congratulate you. Do you speak Czech with him?”

“I spoke it with Luboš.”

“I don’t know as I realized that.”

“But this isn’t like with Luboš. It isn’t serious.”

“That is the way, now,” she said, as if a little disappointed in him.

“I don’t mean I don’t like him. He’s nicer than Luboš. What I mean is there isn’t any mystery about it.”

He needed to catch his breath. He shipped the oars. Annie wasn’t looking
at him. What he didn’t say was that he was beginning to wonder if this was the way one always ought to go to bed with people: as if it weren’t so meaningful, as if it were to one side of the story one was in.

“I don’t know as I should mind that, if I were you.”

“I don’t mind it. Maybe I’m not saying it right.”

“It might be quite pleasant, to be able to have that,” she said, speculatively. “To be unencumbered, as it were. Though I find in my own case there’s always a mystery, as you call it, if I’m soft on a person.”

The current was turning the skiff again. Jacob pulled on the oars to straighten it. He watched Annie’s eyes as she watched the Charles Bridge approach, and over his shoulder, every few strokes, he took a glimpse of the tall, jagged, two-story piers himself, so as to be able to aim the boat between two of them.

“Is it quite safe? With the current, I mean.”

“I’ll just have to row a little harder.”

They passed into the black water of the shade of the bridge. Out of the corner of either eye, Jacob watched the gray, triangular battlements slide up from behind and widen, approaching them on either side, in embrace. Then the bridge itself crossed overhead with its water-blackened stones. While it covered them, hands seemed cupped over their ears; all they could hear was the water’s eager lapping against the heavy walls beside them.

“Are you fair to him?” Annie asked.

The black stones lifted off, and the air was free and empty again around them. “It’s not like that.” He watched recede the semicircular—circular, in the water’s haphazard mirroring—portal through which they had passed.

“Isn’t it.”

“He’s going to Karlovy Vary himself, at the end of the summer.”

“Not quite to the other end of the world.”

“Are you going to stay past the summer?” Jacob asked.

“I might do,” she answered. She glanced at him. “Don’t you want to see how it comes out?”

Jacob slowed the pace of his rowing. The triangle of water that they were now drifting in had been smoothed by a weir just upriver. From a distance the river’s weirs could look decorative, like narrow cuffs sewn into the fabric of the water’s surface, but as their skiff came up to this one,
which blocked any further headway, they were able to appreciate the mass and power of the water shoving itself over. The uniformity of the flow contributed to the impression that it gave of implacability; at every point, the same force was insistently pouring its heavy self downstream.

“It’s like that between Henry and me, too, now, I suppose,” Annie continued. She had to speak over the churn of the water. “Do you know, I thought I could persuade him to come boating, they give him an hour for lunch, but he wouldn’t do. I think he feared I might get
ideas
—that it would be too romantic like. But I only asked for the lark.”

Jacob let the current turn the skiff around. He told himself that while rowing back he would think about Annie’s question, the one about seeing how things came out, but a boat travels faster with the current than against it.

*   *   *

Once or twice a week, Milo spent the night, after having let his father know that he would be staying over at his new American friend’s place. Jacob always woke up early the next morning, eager for them to make love again in the new day. It was as if there were a contest between Jacob and the sun to see who could rise earlier. Spring was blowing into summer, and the sun was racing deeper and deeper into the mornings, but sometimes he managed to wake up into a half-light not unlike the half-light in which he had lived out so much of the winter, gray, tender, and general, though now it belonged not to dusk but dawn. The slate through the window was so even that from the bed it wasn’t possible to tell whether it colored a clear sky or one that was uniformly cloudy: the ambiguous color itself seemed to be its only real quality. Milo would be lying in bed beside him at a slant, faintly radiant in his pallor and nakedness, sheets and blanket twisted almost into ropes around and sometimes between his legs. Jacob watched the rise and fall of his ribs until he couldn’t watch peacefully any more and woke him.

There was never any recoil in Jacob, afterward. Because Jacob thought lovemaking was supposed to be free of such reaction, he didn’t wonder much about how he had got free of it. Once, though, when he was feeling pessimistic about himself, it occurred to him that any need he might feel to withdraw from Milo might be sufficiently expressed by the foreknowledge that he was soon going to leave Milo for good, and Prague, too.

A moment later, such a speculation seemed too cynical. The truth was that there was no need to pull back from Milo, who hopped into sex like a duck into a pond—dunked his head vigorously in, swam about happily, briskly shook his feathers clean afterward. He didn’t act as if the pleasure implied anything about what the two of them were going to do next, though it was clear he wasn’t likely to be averse to repeating it. With regard to the future, he seemed to consider Jacob, as an American, to belong to an order of being set somewhat apart—the order of those who don’t stay, who are a little comical in fact in their transience, an order in which he himself to some degree participated, in that at the end of the summer he was going to move to Karlovy Vary, a town full of tourists, and work for a casino, a cartoonishly capitalist enterprise.

Jacob wasn’t returning to America for the sake of school or any career that school might lead to. He was returning for the most part because it upset him that in Prague he had written so little—just one fragmentary story about Meredith. He was impatient with his lack of progress (it was to be a long time before he was able to reason with this kind of impatience, let alone resist it), and he hoped that America would force him to prove himself, rank himself. As a measure of self-discipline he was volunteering to give up the exemption that Prague had seemed to offer. It was only on account of having given it up, of having set himself a postponed reckoning, that he was able to let himself enjoy the summer that remained.

In the summer’s limit, Milo for his part seemed to see no more than a motive for bringing Jacob to experiences in Prague that Jacob had so far missed. At first he merely pointed out opportunities that Jacob was walking past unawares. Jacob was at this stage exploring Malá Strana in greater detail. He had neglected it because it lay on the far side of the river and a little too obviously in the way of the tourists who marched daily across the Charles Bridge to the castle, but he had come to feel that he ought to be bigger in spirit than to fear seeming like a tourist. Still, to distinguish himself from the tourists, he insisted on arriving in Malá Strana by a practical rather than a scenic route, rising into the district on the Malostranská subway station’s long, tedious escalator, two flights of which seemed to be permanently under repair, and then walking down a crooked alley, just as long and tedious if not quite as exhausting, that ran along the rear of several palaces and was lined on both sides with faceless concrete wall for most of its length.

—There are gardens here, do you know? Milo asked, the third or fourth time Jacob led him down the charmless alley. —Take a look. He nodded at a heavy, unlabeled door the size of a horse and carriage, with a smaller door the size of a person cut into it.

—This is allowed? Jacob asked, half to himself, as he pushed open the inner, person-size door. He saw a path of blue gravel crossing green lawn. He stepped carefully over the lower edge of the larger door that framed the smaller one.

The gardens were laid out in a seventeenth-century pattern. Stiff, calf-high hedges drew squares around green lawns and within the lawns drew circles around flowerbeds. The flowers themselves had gone past; no more than a few white petals were still scattered in the leaves of the plants, which in the lateness of the season had grown from beauty into mere health, monotonously and diffusely green, washing up lazily against the woody hedges that encircled and contained them. At the corners of the sectioned lawns, bronze statues were streaked somewhat wildly with white and green verdigris. Water jetted from a statue of a woman and child into a large basin.

—Is it pleasing to you? Milo asked.

—It’s excellent. We have to come back.

—But we are here now.

Maybe it was the mistaken impression that they had stumbled onto a secret that had caused Jacob to imagine that the point of the place was to come back to it later.

Two women sat gossiping on a stone bench in the shade while their children, elfishly thin, wearing nothing but underwear and sockless shoes, skipped from one hedged quadrant to another. The children had an inflatable red-and-white ball, and their game seemed to be to tag one another with it. It was so easy to dance away that in order to have any fun it was necessary for them to endanger themselves by coming needlessly close.

—They aren’t shy, said Jacob.

—Why would they be shy?

—In America, even children, if they are not clothed…

—But you’re not a Puritan, not you.

—No, Jacob admitted. —But you and I…, he continued, but he trailed off. He had been going to defend America’s morals, or lack thereof, by pointing out that on Prague’s subways and trams he and Milo
allowed no more than the backs of their hands to touch, but the touch had become a habit and Jacob found that he would rather let his point go than cast a light on it in any way critical.

—Here you and I, said Milo, pointing at a bronze of two wrestling men. The figures didn’t seem to be Antaeus and Hercules—their four feet were planted on earth—but merely two Enlightenment gentleman-gymnasts, thick-muscled and delicately coiffed. Rain had blanched with verdigris the rippled chest of one of them, who stood upright, pushed slightly backward, exposingly, by his partner, who was bent over and was pulling toward him the upright man’s left thigh while pushing away his right shoulder. The upright man, who wore a trim moustache, looked down at the other with a look of concern, almost tender. A clean-minded viewer was supposed to understand that the statue represented the men just before the lower threw the upper off his balance, but as a statue the statue belied this interpretation, because it held them together eternally in poise, and where the lower man placed his hand on the upper one’s thigh, and the upper one placed his hand over that hand, it was just as possible to imagine that the pressure of the second hand was intended to confirm and hold that of the first one.