Necessary Errors: A Novel (49 page)

Sometimes he had fallen in with American tourists at a café and had spent the day flirting with the women and debating philosophy with the men. Often he had met Henry at his office in Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, and they had gone for lunch. Henry worked at the Czechoslovak office for visiting foreign students, which stood in relation to the international students union, where Hans worked, roughly as the government had stood until recently in relation to the party, and was therefore slightly less doomed and much more busy. Carl reported that Henry took his job seriously and always returned to his office within an hour, no matter how far their confidences and arguments took them. Carl was then left to wander on his own in the district with a head full of ideas. Once he came home with a set of cream-colored plates, bowls, teacups, and saucers, freckled with age and embellished with delicate red and silver tracery, which he had purchased in an
antikvariát
for ten dollars probably because, he said, he and Henry had been talking about whether it was possible to reconcile the need for a home with the search for beauty. He presented them as a gift for the apartment, saying that he didn’t think they’d survive transport to America.

One evening, Carl told Jacob that he had dropped in on Mel and Rafe in Havelská and had drunk slivovitz with them.

“How was that?” Jacob asked.

“They send their love,” Carl replied. His face still seemed a little muddied by the liqueur they had given him. “Kaspar’s coming to see you
tomorrow,” he reported. “Melinda says he was very grateful for your visit, and apparently he’s back from Berlin.”

“I didn’t know he had gone there.”

“His father’s sick. The one in the Stasi.”

“I didn’t know about that, either.”

“That may not be exactly right. Melinda said he was in the Stasi, but Rafe said he thought he was just an informer. But Melinda said Kaspar hated him so much he couldn’t just have been an informer. I guess he was a professor?”

“I bet if you were a professor, you had to cooperate.”

They fell silent for a moment. Jacob noticed that Václav’s water dish was empty and refilled it.

“I won’t be here tomorrow,” Carl said. “I told Melinda I’d go with her to the castle to see the mediocre Impressionists they have.”

“Rafe doesn’t mind?”

“It’s just bad art. I’m always missing Kaspar. I wonder if I’ll see him even once before I leave Prague.”

“You’ll see him.”

“Not seeing him would be like going to Bern and not seeing the bear.”

“He’s just a person,” Jacob said.

“I don’t know,” Carl said facetiously. “This whole ‘Could you spare a little crust of eating bread?’ routine, where he goes to town on Mel and Rafe’s refrigerator?”

“He doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s very principled.”

“I guess so, if he won’t speak to his father.”

“I thought you said he went to Berlin.”

“But he wouldn’t speak to him, is what Melinda said. He just saw him.”

The sun had set while they had been talking, and the light that still fell into the apartment was now even and gray. “Are you hungry?” Carl asked.

Jacob shrugged.

Carl got up and looked in the refrigerator. “Can you eat another tuna-fish sandwich?”

“I’ll make them.” Jacob was pretty sure the olives in the can he’d opened
last week were still good. He also liked to put in grated carrots, because he thought the two of them needed vitamins. Carl dragged his bag to his bedroom to unpack it.

“Did Rafe say what he was really doing in Brussels?” Jacob called out across the apartment.

“I’ve decided not to think about that question any more,” came back the reply. “You know, with the war and everything.” He laughed at his own disingenuousness.

*   *   *

From his bedroom window, Jacob saw Kaspar trying to ring the disconnected buzzer in the gatepost at the end of the driveway. The dogs saw him, too, and began to bark, but before
could come downstairs, Jacob threw on his coat and, with his boots untied, walked out the back of the house and around to the sidewalk. The weather had turned cold again, and he could feel chilly air fingering his ankles.

Under the German’s scarf was another scarf, and under his coat he wore two sweaters. “Don’t take off your shoes if you don’t want to,” Jacob said. “I don’t have any slippers to offer you.”

“But I am wearing socks.” He glanced down to show them off as he pulled his feet out of his shoes. “Pretty white socks, from the mother of Rafe, for his exercise.”

“He didn’t want them?”

“He said no,” Kaspar answered, marveling at his good luck and staring at Jacob steadily, almost hungrily, as if he were afraid of missing any part of Jacob’s reaction. Jacob stared back out of a confused kind of politeness. They stepped into Jacob’s kitchen, still awkwardly linked by the eyes. The curtains were wide open, and in the afternoon sun, Jacob noticed how much thinner Kaspar’s beard was than Carl’s. Among its gray and red bristles were patches of cheek as neutral and delicate as the new skin revealed when a scab falls off.

“Water? Milk?” Jacob offered. “Tea?”

“I will have milk. And perhaps later tea.” His eagerness to accept had the effect of making the bestower feel almost princely.

“Please, sit down,” Jacob offered.

Instead Kaspar approached Jacob and touched him on the forearm, startling him. “But first, if it is not a trouble,” Kaspar said, “I would like to see, where it is that you write.” He studied Jacob’s face. “Oh,” he
continued, stepping back as if sensing he had intruded, “is it already here?” He pointed to the kitchen table he had hesitated to sit down at.

“Sometimes. But it’s—.” Too embarrassed to finish the sentence, Jacob stepped into the doorway of his bedroom and pointed at his Olivetti, which sat, an oversize paperweight, on top of the pages that he had managed to type about Meredith.

“You write in sitting on the floor?” Kaspar’s tone suggested he was willing to believe in an athletic regimen of some kind.

“No, I usually put the typewriter on that little table.”

“May I?” Kaspar asked. He walked into the bedroom and crouched down beside the machine. “But it is lovely,” he admired.

The Olivetti was a subtle jade color, the finish of its metal cool to the touch, and its curves sensuous. When pressed, the pads of the keys swung down and into the machine with an easy heaviness, and the type bars struck the platen with orderly, satisfying claps. It had cost a hundred dollars in a used-typewriter store in Cambridge. An older boy, another crush of Jacob’s, had had one just like it, and after Jacob had bought it, Jacob had been afraid that there was something indecent about his having a typewriter just like his friend’s. It was as if he had bought a piece of clothing beyond his means and then realized that the extravagance would show if he wore it in public. Fortunately, a typewriter isn’t public, for the most part. Carl was allowed to borrow it, of course.

They retreated to the kitchen, and in a somewhat businesslike manner Jacob poured Kaspar a glass of milk. Kaspar drank it greedily but methodically, sucking stray drops out of his ragged moustache between sips. Halfway through, he paused and fell still, and the hamster, whose cage was at his elbow, crept out of a nest of paper. The animal, however, made no impression on the German, who looked only at Jacob, who after a while did not know where to look. He thought of finding his camera and taking Kaspar’s picture, so that Carl would be able to see what Kaspar looked like.

“It is cold,” Kaspar said, at last.

“The milk?” Jacob asked.

“I wanted to say, that the day is cold, but the milk also.”

“I could warm the milk up for you.”

“Ah no! I am only waiting a moment, in order to make longer my enjoyment.”

“Oh,” said Jacob. The delay was a philosophical adjustment of some kind; Jacob was afraid it was rude to have called attention to it. “Thank you for coming all the way out here,” Jacob continued.

“Not at all. It is not far. And I have brought you, I now remember, something from Melinda. Fishes.”

“Fishes?”

“They are from the West.” He rummaged in the knapsack at his feet and brought out a red tin of Spanish anchovies.

Because Jacob had never eaten any, the gift frightened him a little, but he made an effort to rise to the challenge. “Thank you.”

“Perhaps, when we have the tea,” Kaspar suggested.

“Oh, good idea.”

“You seem in good health,” Kaspar said, resuming his milk.

“My
neschopenka
is up on Wednesday, and I think I’ll go back to work.”

“And your war, also, is ‘up,’ as you say.”

“My war?”

“In Kuwait. Since two days, I think.” Seeing that the news surprised Jacob, Kaspar shrugged, to make light of it. “It changes nothing.”

“Well, I guess that was the point.”

“Mmm,” said Kaspar, slouching over his glass.

“You have a theory.”

“Not today! At least there were no bombs in Prague. Do you know, I have been in Berlin.”

“I heard. To see your father. Is he all right?”

“He is going to die,” Kaspar answered, with a little smile. His eyes shifted to his glass, inside which the milk had left a bluish film.

Jacob had the impression that in saying this Kaspar had wanted to make him laugh. “You say that as if—”

“A month ago I was going to die, and now he.” He shrugged it off as he had shrugged off the war against Iraq. “We are a family. He is, do you know—the word in Czech is
.”

Jacob nodded. When the student newspaper editors had published the StB contract, they had used the word in their caption.

“He cannot bear to be out of favor,” Kaspar continued. “Even with me, now, he thinks it would be something to be in favor.”

Jacob nodded, trying not to take a side in a family dispute. Kaspar’s face
seemed looser and paler than it had been a moment ago, as if he were drawing license for what he was saying from his own illness.

“I love him as one loves a dog or a cow,” Kaspar continued. “Something you do not speak to.”

“Did he say anything when you saw him?”

“Many things.” Kaspar waved a hand with a flourish, to suggest rhetorical flights. His smile grew crooked and subtle. “But I am interested in
your
progress,” he said, by way of closing the subject.

Jacob shrugged and held off Kaspar’s attention for a few more moments: “Will you write about it?”

“About Berlin?” Kaspar hesitated. “Oh, I translate, and I comment. But I am not so a writer.”

“Comment is writing.”

“If you say.” He seemed pleased by Jacob’s solicitude, and Jacob wondered if it was his duty to invite Kaspar to join the writing group. “Have you written, in your ‘holiday’?”

“I’m trying to write about my friend, but I’ve been having some trouble,” Jacob admitted.

Kaspar’s face brightened at the opportunity to be of use.

“I think it’s because I’m angry at her.”

“It is
about
her,” Kaspar said, to be sure he understood.

“It’s fiction.”

“Of course, of course. And what is the nature of the trouble?”

Jacob hesitated and then said, “Maybe you could read what I have.”

“May I? Then let us have the tea, and perhaps to open the fishes and to have them with little breads as I read, yes? Do you say that in English,
, as the Czechs do?”