Necessary Errors: A Novel (84 page)

“I?” she asked, pointing to herself, flustered as always when a question singled her out. For a few moments she made a show of considering
the idea, looking first at one corner of the ceiling and then at another. She folded her hands. —No, I don’t want.

“She does not want,” Lucie explained, with a sly smile, “how do you say,
.”

“Bindings?” Jacob guessed. “No, that’s not it.”

“A child is one,” said Lucie. “A garden.”

“Commitments,” said Jacob. “She doesn’t want any commitments.”

—May I tell? Lucie asked
, who rolled her eyes for an answer. “She is going to study at the faculty of law,” Lucie revealed.

“Law school?
?”

“I know!” said
, nodding her head and then shaking it, as if she thought it was a great joke. “Law school! I! Can you believe?”

“She must,” said Lucie. “It is a new world.”

“And I will live at the school,”
herself said.

“In the dormitory?” Jacob asked.

She threw up her hands at the prospect of incorporating such a word into her vocabulary, but she nodded.

“And your parents?”

“Mother is very sad.” She shrugged. It was the fate of mothers. “Father is nervous, as you know. They—
ale ne, ale ne,
” she broke off.

“What?”

She hesitated. “If I say, you must…
?”

“‘Be silent.’ ‘Not tell.’ I won’t tell. There’s no one I could tell.”

“Yes?”
said. Despite her loyalty she was eager to communicate her secret. “They want to send him to Kuala Lumpur.”

“Jesus.”

“First Warsaw, now Kuala Lumpur,” said
, as if one exile inevitably deteriorated to another. She seemed to enjoy saying the Malaysian city’s name. “They say, he did well in Poland.” She shrugged again; her father’s equivocal success was as far beyond remedy as her mother’s sorrow. —It is fearful, fearful, she said in Czech, laughing blackly.

“It could be exciting,” Jacob said, for the sake of politeness.

“Could be,” replied
, unfooled, with cool emphasis.

They turned to their lesson.

*   *   *

For two days Václav ran on his new wheel incessantly. Once or twice, afraid that the animal was overdoing it, Jacob took the wheel out of the
cage for a spell, but the creature seemed to be at a loss without it, and Jacob put it back. When Jacob woke up the third morning, he didn’t hear the wheel turning. He found the hamster bestilled, resting on its side in the curve of the toy.

The timing was convenient. Had it really exercised itself to death? A warning to Americans, said Milo. Or maybe, Jacob speculated, there had been something toxic in the glue that held the cage together. Jacob emptied a pack of cigarettes and lifted the wheel up so as to be able to tip the hamster into the pack without having to touch its body. Once the two men had dressed, Jacob took a knife and spoon from the kitchen drawer, and they walked to the foot of the street, where a row of evergreen shrubbery kept citizens from approaching a fenced-off railroad track. While Milo stood guard, Jacob crouched and dug a hole under a shrub with the knife and spoon. When the hole seemed deep enough to deter a cat, Jacob laid the cigarette pack in. He scraped the dirt back over it with his shoes and stomped it down.

—It is curious, this burying a pet, said Milo.

—It’s the custom in the suburbs of America.

—It’s a gentle custom.

—We buried our dog in our garden, Jacob said, as if the memory was an explanation.

Their plan for the day, a Saturday, was to see the exhibit in the Powder Tower where a couple of Milo’s photos were on display. By the time they reached
Republiky, they were hungry, so they bought
, or sugared
, for a few crowns from a cart on the southwest corner of the square. The corner was unshaded, and they blinked in the glare as the vendor poured two thin pools of yellow batter onto his griddle, which was still shiny and steel gray at this early hour. As they ate, a dust of sugar fell on Milo’s shirt, an olive green one that Jacob liked because of a brass ring pull on its zipper. Milo fluttered the shirt to bounce the sugar off, but the oil on his fingers left a stain where he held the fabric. He swore, and in frustration he pulled the chest of the shirt up to his mouth and tried to suck the oil and sugar out of the cloth, thoughtlessly exposing the soft, pale column of his belly.