Necessary Errors: A Novel (23 page)

—Antibiotics? Jacob asked.

They knocked at the pharmacy attached to the hospital for a quarter of an hour, but no one answered. Jacob wondered, as they waited, whether the doctor’s rudeness had covered embarrassment.

When they reached home again, empty-handed,
gave him her family’s supply of Paralen, which she said was like aspirin, and he agreed to leave his door unlocked, so she and her mother could check on him in the morning without waking him. She told him that according to her dictionary the English word for what he had was “quinsy.”

*   *   *

The antibiotics, which
fetched from a local pharmacy the next morning, seemed weak; they moderated the illness but did not defeat it. Jacob, however, found it easy to accommodate himself. In the mornings he was cool and lucid, for the most part, though he became dizzy if he stood up quickly. When he could, he took advantage of his morning strength by making a soup or a soda bread—something large and simple, which would keep. Then, as a treat, he lay on the couch and read Stendhal. Somehow he was always able to resume the story of Fabrice without confusion, though he could not call it to mind until he picked the book up. It was as if the French language were a separate room from the one he inhabited when he spoke Czech or English, and the story of Fabrice were going on in that room only. To be present in the room without reserve he needed a silence like the one his illness afforded. He had never had one like it in America.

At some point in the afternoon a small task would find him impatient, and then another would fluster him, and for a remedy he would run a hot bath. After stepping into it, he would carefully dry his fingers and read Stendhal there for half an hour more, prolonging the day’s span of clarity by means of the water and the novel. It usually held until dinner, during which he would begin to feel disoriented. At night he
sweated himself to sleep, the fever breaking at some unconscious hour early in the next day.

He wondered once or twice if it was conversion sickness, but he didn’t torment himself with the idea, because he had never done anything not allowed, not even with Luboš, and because the illness felt too familiar. He was fairly sure that the Czech quinsy translated as the American strep throat, in his case, anyway. He had suffered from strep so often as a child that he recognized it as an old companion.

The illness made an interlude, not unlike his first weeks of solitude in the apartment. When he telephoned the school, the head of the English department, a clever and matronly woman, assured him generously that he would not be expected at work for at least two weeks, then grew alarmed and cautious when he admitted that the doctor hadn’t issued a certificate of illness during his middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room, and finally generous once more upon hearing that
would take him to the neighborhood clinic first thing Monday for the proper documentation, called a
neschopenka
. “It is a crime to stay home without one,” the head of the department sighed into the phone. “It is the old system, still. We have not got trust here. And there is a control, a special police, who visit to see that you are at home as you say. You must ask
to go to the shops for you, in case they should come.”

did shop for him, though no police officer ever visited. The first errand he set
, however, was a telephone call to Luboš’s number, saying that he was too ill to keep their Saturday date. As soon as he sent her off, he regretted it, because he realized that in his condition he could probably have won a limited permission to use the phone socially himself, and he was afraid Luboš might perceive an attempt to establish distance in his deputizing of the call.

He had a great deal of time to think about Luboš during his enforced holiday, so much time and so little shaped by physical effort that his thoughts took on an abstract and idealist cast. He was growing proud of the relationship, he felt, and he wondered if the pride was false or naïve. By its nature a relationship was not an accomplishment. It was just a connection that happened to exist, for as long as it did exist. To a confidant, if there had been one, he might have excused the pride by referring to the communication that Luboš and he were establishing between cultures.
What really pleased him was less grand and more peculiar. It was that he had felt no wish to back away after his reunion with Luboš, perhaps because of Luboš’s belief in his innocence, or whatever quality it was that they were agreeing to call by that name, which had nothing to do with sexual fidelity or appetite. He felt sure that Luboš had the quality, too.

It was an end to shame, he thought with exaltation. (He was sipping tea and sitting in the kitchen’s morning sun, as he thought this. The illness, during its abatements, seemed to make him more susceptible to such accesses.) It was odd that, directed by Daniel’s scorn, he had spent so much time trying not to be taken as an innocent. It was hard to know what the quality in question meant to Luboš, exactly. It might be no more than an echo of Christianity or of Communism. The innocent belonged to the communion, in both cases. They were happy in it; they had no wishes apart from it; their hungers were satisfied. No, that wasn’t right, Jacob corrected himself. It was not the innocent but the believers, or maybe just the saved.…

He listed in his journal things he wished he knew about Meredith. Where she was buried. Whether she had been worried about money. Whether her parents had ever spoken to her again. Once, when
was unpacking with care the eggs, onions, lentils, carrots, and milk that she had bought for him, and laying the items gently on the kitchen table for his approval, he remembered almost unwillingly the violent way Meredith had used to take her Peters edition of the
Well-Tempered Clavier
out of her satchel, as if she scorned to have any concern for the book as a thing, and the similar violence—or rather, a precision so dry it sounded like violence—with which she played from it, throwing down the notes dismissively as if none of them deserved to be part of the piece of music they together suggested, as if the time spent playing them were a waste she couldn’t keep herself from.

—I also had a friend who committed self-murder,
offered, seeming to read his thoughts.

—I’m sorry, Jacob answered.