Necessary Errors: A Novel (31 page)

By the time Jacob reached his apartment, the sun had set. The light above the oven was the only one he had left on. The salt dish for Václav’s water had spilled, and Václav wasn’t visible. On end in a corner, the toilet paper tube came within a few inches of the cage’s rim. Jacob looked down it and saw nothing. The hamster must have scaled the roll and hopped out. Jacob went still and held his breath.

After a few minutes, he heard Václav under the wardrobe in the bedroom, chewing. He got on his hands and knees and tried to tempt him with a bit of dry
rohlík
, but the animal was timid, so Jacob poked a broom handle under the wardrobe and then grabbed him as he ran out. He worried that Václav might have eaten poison, and he sat talking with him for a while afterward, admonishingly. He tried to share the promised orange, but the hamster was too rattled to eat.

—Václav escaped, but I caught him, Jacob told
, when she knocked soon after. —With my own hands.

—Clever thing.

—Who? I or he?

—Both? Excuse me, please, but I must count the windows. She covered her face with one hand and shook her head beneath it. —Is here the census. Do you understand? With a notebook and many questions. It is horrible.

—Did you tell him I’m here?

—You? No.

—But you have to.

—I think, that no.

—But yes. A census must count everyone. Even Americans. Please ask him.

—You’re so eager, she marveled. —But first I have to count the windows.

After Jacob’s kitchen and bedroom,
opened a door beside his wardrobe—unlocked but never tried by Jacob—into unused rooms that continued the ground floor. “
,” she said, looking down in dismay. She stepped carefully in, among a sofa that matched the one that
Jacob slept on, a table-mounted sewing machine with a cast-iron foot treadle, two veneer-and-plywood wardrobes, a pillar of linoleum tiles whose pattern matched those in the Stehlíks’ upstairs kitchen, skis, ski boots, a green woman’s bicycle with flat tires, a tea set whose cups were stacked crazily, black plastic bags stuffed with cloth of some kind, rolls of carpet, a disconnected water heater, and, leaning against a wall, in a glassless frame, a poster of a shirtless man holding a baby against his chest. Though uninvited, Jacob followed
in. —This is frightful, she commented. —Our shame!

She proceeded into another room, and then, turning a corner, yet another, both as cluttered as the first.

—Why aren’t the rooms open? Jacob asked.

—When the grandparents lived here, it was not so.

—If I had a friend…, Jacob began.

—You must ask Father,
cut him off. They had walked a C-shape and now were coming out into the stairwell, through a door opposite the entrance to Jacob’s apartment. —On the ground floor, six windows.

—And seven doors.

—Doors don’t interest him.

Jacob walked back into his apartment. In his bedroom he shut the door to the unused rooms. He would no longer be able to feel that the room he slept in was the last one at the far, snug end of a cave. He already had the sense of sharing the space. Sharing it with Carl, he hoped. He would be able to show him everything. Carl wouldn’t even know how to validate his ticket on the tram—how to slip it into the metal device, the size of a fist, that was mounted on a pole in the center of the car and how to pull so that a distinctive pattern was punched into the ticket’s numbered, tic-tac-toe-like grid. Now that Jacob had a pass, he rarely used the tickets. But sometimes he bought a handful to get him through the first few days of the month, before he got the new month’s sticker. They were more satisfying, somehow, in their triviality and multiplicity, and because of the ritual of punching them. He used them as bookmarks and forgot to throw them away. The only time he had been checked on a tram, the
revizor
had patiently held half a dozen up to the light before finding the one ticket punched in a pattern that corresponded to the car and the day that they were in.

—You are right,
conceded, upon returning. Her face was pink from having gone up and down the stairs.

—Excellent!

In her manner she played up the impression that she begrudged him the official recognition. —First name, sir?

He spelled it out for her. “Jay,” he called.

“Yuh,” she echoed.

“Ay.”

“Ah.”

“See.”

“Tsuh.”

And so on. She took down his family name, year of birth, and country of origin.

—This is good, Jacob said. —Now I will be Czech!

—I think, that no.

—But yes!

“Yah-tsop Poot-nahm,”
intoned as she rose from her chair, pronouncing his name in strict accordance with the laws of Czech phonics, —
you
will never be Czech!

*   *   *

“What if I were your
half
brother,” Carl suggested, as they planned by phone for his arrival.

“But we’re the same age.”

“I look older, I think.”

“She had a very dramatic life, our mother,” Jacob objected.

“Or father. In that case the age thing wouldn’t be as much of a problem.”

“Be serious.”

“I could be your stepbrother.”

“He only heard you on the phone a couple of times. And
won’t care.”

“So we’re just friends. We’re having the conversation where you tell me we’re just friends.”

“As I recall we already had that conversation. I’ll say you’re willing to pay as much as I’m paying. Eight hundred crowns a month.”

“What is that, thirty dollars? My god. We’re robbing them.”

“You’ll have your own room and your own window. But you’ll share my bathroom and kitchen.”

“My own window!”

“It’s the equivalent of a week’s salary,” Jacob said, with some asperity. “It’s not free.”

*   *   *

Annie’s mother bought her a ticket home for the holidays. The day before she flew, she and Jacob took the tram to his place after work. At Palmovka, where they had to transfer, she insisted on stopping in at a
cukrárna
. “You don’t mind, do you? I stop in almost every day, and I’d like to wish them a happy Christmas.”

In the store window, behind smudged glass and in front of a half curtain of polyester lace, lay white trays of cookies, rectangular-sliced cakes, and pastries. A motherly woman in a hairnet served behind the counter, placing on a cardboard square the sweets that each customer ordered. “A co dál?” she prompted, as soon as a customer made an indication. “A co dál?” And what further? When a customer said that that was all, the woman tore a length of light gray paper off a roll and wrapped the cardboard and the sweets in it, twisting shut two corners on top. Two pretty teenage girls, also in hairnets, assisted her, one at the cash register, the other ferrying new trays to the counter from a room in back.