Necessary Errors: A Novel (21 page)

—Do you have roses?

—But it is winter, see? You see what we have.

There was nothing better than red-dyed carnations, so he took them. He considered the First of May Bridge, the one near Café Slavia, which cut across
island, because it would be more or less solitary, but then he decided that with such ugly flowers he couldn’t choose anything less than the most beautiful bridge, the Charles, even if it was so beautiful as to be a cliché.

On the bridge itself, standing in what was now sleet, he was miserably cold and wet, and it was difficult to compose himself and find the feeling that he had meant to put into the gesture. It helped to face the river, so he leaned over the thick stone ledge and looked upstream toward the long shining weir, which cut the water into planes. Beneath him, where the river flowed quietly around the piers of the bridge, the water was black, and when he dropped his first flower, it felt more like an experiment than a tribute. The carnation turned gray as it fell, and after it hit the water, it dipped and rose once or twice on the surface like a person turning on a bed to get comfortable, before the current carried it under the bridge, out of sight. As he dropped the rest, singly, he had an incongruous memory, which he could not shut out. It was a story that an older gay man, a professor of French literature, had told him in a taxi in the spring. Though sick, the professor had agreed to come with Jacob’s friends from a dinner party to a bar. In the taxi he had changed his mind about his strength and decided to go home, but not before telling Jacob—who had confided his hopeless crush on…he couldn’t remember now for sure, but it must have been on Carl—a story from the 1970s, of asking a straight friend to undress and lie on the floor, while he, the professor, not then a professor, sat above him on a chair and dropped twelve dozen roses onto his chest, one by one. “This is how beautiful you are to me, that’s what I was telling him,” the professor recalled. “At first he laughed and thought I was ridiculous, but I didn’t say
anything, and after the hundredth rose or so, I could see that he saw that I meant it, and then I could see that he was hard, and I kept dropping the roses.”

Jacob flattened and folded up the wrapping paper that had carried the flowers. He wished they had been roses.

*   *   *

Returned to his apartment, Jacob changed into a dry T-shirt and underwear, and ate some bread and jam. He left the cushions he used for bedding on the couch, because he thought he would be warmer there than on the floor. But he woke up cold nonetheless after what seemed only a few minutes of dozing. He carefully doubled his red blanket so that it would be twice as thick but still cover all of him and tried again. Instead of drifting back over the events of the day, however, his mind fell into a rut, like a heavy lawnmower yanking after it the child who is supposed to be pushing it. First he had to sound out all the letters in the Czech word for “bookstore,” which is a long one, over and over. The task gradually changed into a nonsensical conversation in English about buying a bus ticket, and this too he seemed to rehearse, as if he were preparing in his mind to teach it as a lesson at the language school. He could only stop himself from repeating it by making an effort to come awake. When he did, he recognized in the repetitions the stamp of fever.

As an experiment, he swallowed. The back of his throat pained him. He waited for a while in the almost-dark, hoping the symptoms would subside. The heavy curtains no more than dimmed the light from the street lamps outside, and under the covers he felt a certain security in the room. Those were his books on the shelf, after all. On the floor the lime carpeting was bland and familiar. There was the wardrobe where he hung his shirts. There was the small, circular, white-painted table he used as a desk. He felt that the room was on his side and that it was safe to wait here. He closed his eyes. But the fever continued to force his mind to run through drills.

In the medicine cabinet, he found a thermometer left behind by
grandparents, wider and easier to read than the kind he had grown up with. The back of it was a solid forest green. It reminded him of a pen he had owned as a child, a souvenir from a French town, given to him as a gift, which had had a window where a skiff sailed from one side of a bay to another as you turned it upside down and then right side up
again. On his way back to the couch, he fetched from the wardrobe his down sleeping bag, which he hadn’t used since buying the red blanket. Under this layer and the others he took his temperature. It was in Celsius, which he couldn’t interpret, but he didn’t think it looked high and so fell once more into an uneasy doze, the glass wand resting in his hand.

Upon waking this time, he draped the red blanket around him and went to sit at the kitchen table. While retaking his temperature, he put water on to boil for tea and wrote nonsense in one of his notebooks with colored pencils. The words looked grand in their variety. I’m going mad, he thought in a spirit of adventure. To translate the measurement, he wrote beneath the words, in orange, the equation 212
32 = 100
0, and then by longhand arithmetic found that he was slightly more than 103 degrees Fahrenheit, a number that scared him.

—Good evening, what is it?
asked civilly after his knocking woke her.

—It is not well with me. He handed her the thermometer to read.

—That is high enough, she agreed.

She brought him into the living room and went to tell her parents. Through their half-open bedroom door, he heard their unguarded murmurs together. In a minute, they filed in quietly in their robes—like a king and queen in Shakespeare, Jacob thought.

—I am sorry—, Jacob began.

—Psh, Mrs. Stehlíková stopped him. —Does it hurt?

—In the throat, he answered.

Mrs. Stehlíková said something, but too rapidly for him to understand. He had the sense of play-acting that one has when calling attention to an illness that hasn’t taken away the ability to walk or think.

translated: “Mother say, that when she has pain in throat, she smokes a cigarette. But she is joking, of course.”

After conferring with her father,
tried several telephone numbers without success. Then she proposed something; Mr. Stehlík answered with subdued exasperation. Her next call got through. Unable to follow what was happening, but feeling cared for, Jacob sank a little into his fever.

“How are you?”
asked in English, when the call was over.