Necessary Errors: A Novel (11 page)

The dining hall held perhaps fifty tables, wrapped in white linen, the silver placed with an almost military correctness. All but a few were empty. The light of the chandeliers was brightened by their gilding and by reflection in the yellow and white of the walls, which framed, on high, murals of the city of Prague. In one, a woman extended her arms to the viewer, as if in welcome.

Luboš and Jacob followed a waiter down a few steps to a table on the main floor. —Kuba, in this building, they declared the republic.

—In November?

—In 1918. The First Republic.

—Where did they declare the current republic?

—Perhaps in Wenceslas?

—You weren’t there?

—I was there a little. I’m not so engagé.

As the twilight failed, the white curtains became more opaque, more solid. It was still just possible to see through them, but one saw not the street but the scaffolding outside the windows. The overall effect was thus of a stage set of a restaurant interior that was becoming more plausible as the lighting was adjusted.

—Kuba, I have a question, Luboš began. He often said this by way of introduction, to help Jacob distinguish an actual question from the uncertainty sometimes audible in his voice as to whether Jacob understood what he was saying. He was smiling unevenly, like a diplomat obliged to raise an awkward subject for the sake of the country he represented. —How did you earn money in America?

—I told you. I worked in an office.

—You did not sell yourself?

—Sell oneself? Jacob echoed the phrase, to ask for clarification. It was a reflexive verb, and sometimes they had unexpected meanings.

—Your body. Your sex. You know what it is, prostitution?

He saw, this time, that Luboš was playing a game of some kind.

—Many people do it. And you are pretty and manly.

—No, I never did. He decided not to try to hide his puzzlement. —Why are you asking?

—I had the impression, that it is normal with you in America.

Jacob could not tell at what level the joke was being played. Was this a misapprehension caused by years of Communist propaganda, or a joke at the expense of the propaganda? Was Luboš mocking the misconceptions that straights have of gays? Or perhaps it was a poke at Jacob’s innocence, which Jacob knew he still had not really shed.

—Never? Luboš asked once more. He still wore a diplomat’s smile, as if the question weren’t his, or were asked for a purpose other than that of eliciting an answer, but in his tone of voice there was a conflicting note, which Jacob would have called sorrow, if that didn’t seem discordant, and in the repetition of the question there was insistence, as if Luboš needed to have something settled, though perhaps he wasn’t sure he was ready for it to be.

It occurred to Jacob that a pause might be mistaken for complicity. —No, never, he said.

—Well, then, Luboš said, as if winding up a conversation. He seemed to see further doubts in Jacob’s eyes and added, —I did not really think it of you specially. I was kidding.

—You kid a lot.

—An awful lot, you’re right. Don’t become angry.

—No, no, Jacob assured him. Luboš seemed afraid that he might have hurt Jacob. Jacob realized he hadn’t washed his hands, and they felt hot and prickly; his palms were white, with red mottling. —I’m going to…, he began, and he rubbed his hands in pantomime.

In the restroom he paid fifty hellers to the attendant, even though he wasn’t going to use a urinal; it was simpler than trying to explain. Recently someone had taught him an obscene word for the women who worked in restrooms, who looked grandmotherly but were usually quite stern. A word for them and a word for waiters—perhaps there was an obscenity for everyone who was placed by work in the way of the public. He washed his face, too, and decided not to let the conversation return to Luboš’s question.

The beauty of the dining hall struck him, when he reentered it, like a kind of heat that he could feel on the skin of his face.

*   *   *

Because he knew it by heart, he decided to discuss one of Emily Dickinson’s poems in his first meeting with the school’s most advanced class, which he had recently been asked to teach as a substitute, every other Thursday. He wasn’t sure how advanced the students would be.
was one of them—she had enjoyed his momentary disorientation when she had told him, upon crossing his path in the stairwell at home, that she looked forward to seeing him Thursday afternoon—but that gave him little indication, because it was hard to say how much English she knew. He always tried to speak Czech to her, for the sake of practice, and she, after one or two ironic sallies into English, usually gave her ground and retreated into Czech, as if it were somehow immodest for her to continue in Jacob’s language when he wasn’t speaking it.

He found her sitting in the back row, sharing her textbooks with a bald man who had forgotten his. Neither she nor Jacob betrayed to
the other students that he lived in her parents’ house; she gave her name with the others, neutrally, when he asked the students to introduce themselves.

After reviewing an exercise set by the regular teacher, he wrote the poem on the blackboard, his hands shaking, as they always did before strangers. He then asked them to say what they thought the pronouns referred to, taking them one by one.

When he called on
, she said, “Já?”—me?—and pointed at herself, wide-eyed. But she was able to say when “it” was life, and when afterlife, and what it is we don’t believe. Slowly the class unriddled the poem, which Jacob liked because the ambivalence in it was so fine, and the ambiguities so few. It was odd, too, in being composed almost purely of ideas; it had so little in it of the sweet world whose loss concerned it, except perhaps in its sound, which was like a nursery rhyme’s.

After class, he found Annie at the top of the stairs, trying to shift her cassette player and manila folders into her knapsack before they slipped from her hands.

“May I?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s grand, thanks. In these shoes I need a free hand for the banister.” A tall, south-facing window—a modern rectangle of Gothic narrowness—lit the stairwell with thin cold light, which burned into a filament a straw-colored plait that fell over her eyes. “Do you keep to the curricular schedule, Jacob? I don’t see how I’m going to catch up. Today I had them pronounce words that end in B and G and so on, because not one of them could say ‘dog.’ They say ‘doc,’ have you noticed?”

Thom was waiting for them in the lounge. “Annie, my love, you don’t happen to have any of those apricot pastries left on your hands, by any chance?”

“Did you try the little shop across the way?”

“I did, but the schoolgirls have eaten them all up.”

“You have to go quite early,” Annie told him. “What will you offer in exchange, then? I’ve only four left.”

“Only four! I can offer a Sparta.”

“Mmm. They’re rather rough on the back of the throat, I find. I always feel afterward as if I’m coming down with something.”

Jacob donated a Marlboro light instead, which liberated two pastries, one for him and one for Thom.

“Is it true what Michael says, that he’s going back to Edinburgh because you’ve found a Czech girlfriend and now he has to drink alone?”

“Michael’s going back to sign on, is what he must have meant to say, before Thatcher and her lot do away with the dole altogether and he misses his chance.”

“I had no idea you were such a conservative,” Annie said.

“I think a working man has a right to know his tax monies are not ill-spent.”

“What’s her name, then?”

“Jana.” He said it shyly.

“A proper Czech name. She sounds quite nice.”

“She is that, yes.”

“She would have to be, to put up with such a lot as you. Is she impressionable?”

“Quite her own person, rather.”

“Will we be meeting her?”

“In time. She doesn’t speak much English yet.”

“And I don’t suppose you’re speaking Czech to her. How do you communicate?”

“It’s always possible,” Jacob put in.

“It is, yes,” Thom reflected.

Annie carefully wrapped the last pastry in the white sack she had bought them in. “Did either of you men of the world know that there’s now a paper shortage? Your man in the shop, there, was reluctant to give
me this sack. I had to plead with him for it. That’s why I bought so many. It was
šest
or nothing.”

“What will you do,” Jacob asked, “if she falls in love with you?”

“I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves,” Thom protested.

“Sorry,” said Jacob.

“Of course she will, though,” said Annie. “You’re such a lad, Thom, not to think of that.”

*   *   *

President Bush was coming to Prague for the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and Jacob invited Luboš to be his date for the celebration in Wenceslas Square. They met under the clock of the disco, as was now their custom. The president was not scheduled to speak until two, but at noon the streets were already full. It was a national holiday, and the crowd was merry. A man in a Mao suit was selling a card game called Marxeso, which was played like Concentration; the object was to turn over matching pairs of twentieth-century dictators, who were Communist except for Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein. Girls in peasant dresses were selling cheaply printed copies of the United States Constitution in Czech. The week before, Jacob had tried to teach his students the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, but the difference did not tell here; Bush was being welcomed in a general and symbolic capacity.

Jacob offered to treat Luboš to pizza at a new, Western-style place near the
subway entrance. It was a restaurant where you stood to eat. A waitress came quickly once they found an end free at one of the high tables.

—Was it like this here last year? Jacob asked.

—No, people were afraid then, Luboš said. —The police were beating people. Today it is like a game.

—So you
were
here.

—A little, he said, as he had before.

The dough was chewy, and the tomato sauce heavily sweetened. Soon they were climbing uphill toward a blue-painted stage that had been erected at the top of the square. Government loudspeakers, mounted in the façades of the buildings like fleurons of gunmetal, had been turned on again for the occasion, and one or two of them crackled
meaninglessly because of a short circuit, already out of repair after just a year’s disuse.

Luboš seemed to be studying the paving stones.

—You’re silent, Jacob accused.

—I’m nervous. He glanced around them before explaining: He and Collin had a third partner, another Czech, who had recently gone missing, just as they were about to sign a lease and hand floor plans over to a builder. Luboš had been asked to apply for extensions on all the permissions and licenses that the business required, a task in some ways more difficult than applying for them in the first place.