Necessary Errors: A Novel (6 page)

Jacob took up the mallets and tried to pick out thirds, fifths, octaves. He didn’t even have a radio in his apartment. Sometimes, at night, a tram that he was riding in would set up vibrations in its rails and wires as it scraped slowly around a curve, and he would leave off reading in order to listen. The sound in the tram’s wires resembled that made by drawing a wet finger along the rim of a wine glass.

It was Kaspar who had arrived. He was a short, bearish man with soft chestnut hair and a disorganized beard, and he was wearing a drooping, broad-striped sweater at least a size too large. Between kissing Melinda and shaking Rafe’s hand, he nodded at Jacob from across the room, as if to signal that he should stay where he was. After the silent communication, Jacob was shy about sounding the instrument.

“Are you able to play?” Kaspar asked, once he had made his way to Jacob.

“This is Jacob,” Rafe put in.

“Oh yes, I know,” said Kaspar. “The writer.” His eyes were glossy with delight.

“I haven’t really written anything yet.”

Kaspar turned to Rafe. “You told me he had written a novel.”

“It’ll never be published, though,” Jacob explained, before Rafe could answer.

“That is not what matters,” Kaspar said. His eyes weren’t aligned, Jacob saw; one of them wandered, though each seemed to be studying him from its distinct angle. “It is the spirit of what you are doing.” He seemed on the verge of tears as he spoke, and Jacob sensed that Kaspar was offering an idea that had given him solace.

A Westerner hardly deserved the benefit of it. “I’m an American,” Jacob protested. “There’s no one I can blame for holding me back.” He was reluctant to contradict the man any more sharply; he seemed so fragile.

“It is still the spirit that matters,” Kaspar insisted.

“If I believed that, I might never actually do anything. I might never get around to being the person I thought I was.”

A flicker of mischief came into the East German’s eyes. “Yes, those are the conditions we lived under.”

It was a bribe offered not from an intention to corrupt but from a wish to be pleasant to a new friend. The man’s skin hung loosely at his wrists and under his cheekbones, Jacob saw, as if he had recently lost more weight than he could afford to. He was like a monk who, in a misplaced spirit of penance, was offering to sell short his and his brothers’ labors. “Really, I don’t have your excuse.”

“Is it only an excuse?”

Rafe interrupted: “I feel obliged to warn you, Jacob, that Kaspar was anti-Communist only until the Berlin Wall was breached, and then switched sides.”

Kaspar glanced at Rafe. “I sound so contrary, in your story of me,” he said. “In reality I had no choice. So many horrible people were becoming anti-Communist that day. It was an opportunity for them. They were my—what is the word? In Czech they are called
.”

“Weathervanes,” Rafe supplied.

“They were my weathervanes,” Kaspar continued. “If they were willing to betray Communism, there was something in the idea after all.”

“So he’s not going to agree that it’s harder to be a writer under Communism than capitalism,” Jacob said, addressing Rafe.

“No, he’s probably not,” Rafe answered.

“I am not an optimist,” Kaspar said, “except about spirit.”

Jacob was embarrassed for Kaspar. The avowal reminded him of people he knew from school with high but vague ambitions, who after graduation had moved to bad neighborhoods and taken jobs supposedly beneath them, in order not to be reminded of the larger competition they hadn’t wished to enter.

“Are you a writer?” Jacob asked politely.

“Ah, no, only a translator.”

“And a smuggler, eh?” Rafe boasted on Kaspar’s behalf. “Countless Czech manuscripts reached their German publishers through Kaspar.”

“I worked in a hospital,” Kaspar explained, “In such a place it is easier to judge whether a person may be trusted.”

“What do you do now?” Jacob asked.

“Why, I teach with you in the language school.”

“He teaches German,” Rafe said.

Jacob noticed that he still had the cimbalom mallets in his hands. He addressed Rafe: “You were going to say where you got this.”

“The director of the symphony asked me to take it home for a while,” Rafe said.

“The symphony?” Jacob echoed, but Rafe drifted away to answer the door again.

Kaspar intercepted Jacob’s look of puzzlement. “Rafe, for example, is a person often trusted.”

The room was filling up. Thom had arrived with a fellow Scot named Michael and with Henry, a wiry Englishman with wide set eyes and curly hair, who had lived in Prague since before the change. Henry was responsible for bringing the Scots to Prague. He had met them while studying philosophy in Edinburgh, and after arriving in Prague he had sent back word of teaching opportunities. Jacob recognized several other teachers from the school as well, and Annie was emerging, with the tentative, cautious steps of a cat, from the kitchen where they had left her.

“Did Rafe help you with the smuggling?” Jacob asked.

“Oh no. He wasn’t working here then.”

Having fetched a beer, Thom came over. “Have you brought me a ham by any chance, Mr. Putnam?”

“I haven’t seen the thing for a couple of days, actually.”

“Jacob’s landlords hung an entire pig beside his door,” Thom explained to the group. “Trying to send him a message, we think.”

“‘Go home, Yank’?” Michael proposed. He was a big man who wore a black fisherman’s cap to hide his thinning hair and was never serious.

“It’s quite impressive,” Thom said, “an entire pig, especially now, when there are no potatoes in the shops. I recommend you stay on good terms with your landlords.”

“I thought it was just my local store that didn’t have potatoes,” Jacob said.

Henry explained: “The farmers are holding back anything that will keep until January, when the market prices take effect.” Like Kaspar and Rafe, he spoke Czech fluently and learned such things easily.

“Is that so, professor,” Thom said.

“But hops and barley fall under a different law,” Henry continued, “so you needn’t worry about your Staropramen.”

“As if my supply of Staropramen were the limit of my interest in the
Czechoslovak economy. I thank you for that.” He took a drink for punctuation.

“Drunken sod,” Michael commented. All the Scots looked up to Henry, and they only allowed so much raillery of him.

“What’s that?” Thom replied. “I thought I heard the sound of a pot addressing a kettle.”

Thom offered around his Sparty, and Jacob took one because he was out of Marlboros. Annie, too, stepped up at the sight of the distribution. Her presence didn’t disrupt the coarse, boyish back-and-forth; she highlighted it, rather, by objecting to the men’s vulgarities with an imperfectly disguised pleasure and by saying, several times, that she expected no better from them. For his part Jacob loved the coarseness, because it meant they did not suspect him; he was one of them, so long as he, too, was insulted freely. He didn’t want them to watch themselves around him; he wanted to belong.

Later, Jacob and Annie found a corner. “Your new friend seems very taken with you,” she began.

“Who’s that?” he asked, startled.

“Kaspar.”

For a moment, he had thought that the details of his visit to T-Club had got out somehow. “Oh, Kaspar. Did you know he taught at the school?”

“Oh yes. He made a comment the other day to the headmistress about my accent. He doesn’t even teach English, mind you. Said I was likely to mislead the students. And Thom’s accent, as well.”

“Oh dear.”

“As if our ways of speaking were inferior. That they are different I don’t deny. But some people would think it an advantage to the students to be exposed to them.”

“He couldn’t have meant it. He seems to have a thing for the underdog.”

“If the underdog is a Harv with running hot water and a full larder. His beady little eyes lit up when Rafe said he knew you from university.”

“We didn’t actually know each other. We more or less have to take each other’s word for it that we were both there.”

“No, you published some poem in the school paper, and Rafe read it.”

“Oh, god.”

“It’s quite sweet, really, that he remembers it.” She took a moment to survey the party as it was taking place around them. “Mind you, I don’t say I dislike Kaspar.”

“You just said he had beady little eyes!”

“Did I? He’s quite kind at times. When one’s out of sorts.”

The air was misty with cigarette smoke, now, and there was a pleasant din—all talk and laughter, because Mel and Rafe had no stereo. “I’m sorry you felt down,” Jacob ventured.

“I daresay you haven’t noticed, and why would you, really, but all the women from the West either brought a man with them or found one immediately they got here. It’s different for the men, of course.”

“That’s such an impersonal way of looking at it.”

“But I think I’m right. Not that I mind enormously, but I had to think it through. Now did you really meet no one last night? I don’t want to hear if it’s
too
sordid. Because I had a friend in Berlin…” She left the sentence unfinished.

*   *   *

On Wednesday, late in the afternoon,
knocked on Jacob’s door. He had lain down for a nap after work and when he answered was not fully awake. “Shower?” he asked her, offering the use of it with a gesture.

“No, no,” she shook her curls. “You have telephone. Upstairs. Come, come. Father is not home yet.”

As she nervously glanced behind, as if afraid her father might suddenly appear, he followed her up into the Stehlíks’ apartment, with its brown-and-green-patterned wallpaper and its red-and-gold-patterned carpets. Mrs. Stehlíková, in the kitchen, silently out-whistled a long drag on a cigarette when she saw him, then grinned and nodded, blinking like her daughter, in welcome. On the stove behind her were two simmering pots, a stew for her family, she explained, and an even larger one for their two dogs, who greeted Jacob by nosing at his crotch.

“Come, come,”
beckoned. In the living room, she handed him the phone’s persimmon-colored receiver and then retreated.

“Hello?” Jacob said into the phone, the base of which, brown with white keys, sat on a tea tray. He perched on the edge of an easy chair of fake green leather.

“Halló? Kubo?”

“Ota?” Jacob asked, though he hadn’t given Ota his number.

—No, replied the speaker, in Czech. —Luboš here. Am I speaking with Jacob?

“Yes, sorry,” Jacob answered, in English. “I didn’t recognize your voice.” He was upset with himself at the misstep. He had thought of Ota because it was Ota who had explained the nickname Kuba to him. Of course he had been hoping for Luboš.

—Please? asked Luboš, not having understood.

—Nothing, nothing, Jacob assured him hurriedly. It was much harder to communicate on the phone than in person, Jacob realized. There was an awkward pause. Jacob’s eyes were caught by two African-style wooden masks on the opposite wall, one smiling, another frowning, like Tragedy and Comedy. He nervously pressed his fingers between adjacent revolutions of the phone cord’s cool spiral.

—Want to meet? Luboš asked, speaking as simply as possible.

—Yes, said Jacob. —When?