Necessary Errors: A Novel (88 page)

—You aren’t giving yourself any? Jacob asked.

—With husband, later, Milena explained, though she sat down at the table to share their enjoyment.

—It’s very good, Jacob complimented Anežka after his first spoonful.

—But what’s good is at the bottom, she protested. —You have to
mine
for the good part.

There was a compote under the custard.

—Gooseberry and cherry, Milena informed Jacob.

—Did you cook it yourself? Jacob asked Anežka.

—With Maminka.

—It’s sublime, Jacob said. —Thank you.

—Sublime, Anežka repeated to her mother.

—He thanked you, Anežka, Milena prompted.

—You’re welcome, she told Jacob, in a singsong voice.

After Milena cleared the dishes away, Jacob took from his backpack a photo of a lion, which he had cut out of a magazine advertisement. Introducing the animal as Simon, Jacob explained that the children were only to obey the commands that Simon said, not those that Jacob issued on his own authority. After a few repetitions of this rule, a few samples of commands said by Simon and commands not said by him, and at last a gloss in Czech, the children understood, and they played Simon Says with him for the next half hour, taking turns according to the rule that whoever failed to know when to obey became the next issuer of commands. From time to time Jacob introduced new vocabulary by acting out its meaning; from time to time the children asked him for vocabulary that they themselves wanted to introduce. At last, in their familiar pattern, the children began to grow a little wild, rebelling against the burden placed on their attention, and their mother, drawn by their outbursts, which she felt a responsibility to suppress, became too much the focus of the children’s attention for the game to continue, and Jacob had to surrender the lesson.

“Please, if I may,” Milena said. “I have for you a gift.” She was holding it behind her back.

Jacob, stowing his props away in his backpack, stopped himself from saying that he didn’t need one.

“It is for memory,” she continued.

As she opened her fist, he knew he would leave the gift behind, unpacked, in his apartment. It was a figurine of Christ, made of ivory-colored plastic, like a chess piece. It wasn’t a crucifix; the god was merely raising his hands above his head in benediction, a pose that prompted in Jacob a pagan analogy to the extended arms of a flying superhero. An American child would be tempted to zoom the figurine around the room. Prokop and Anežka, though, were observing quietly, respectful of the solemnity with which their mother had invested the object. Jacob wished that Carl was still living with him and that he could share a demystifying laugh with him about it when he got home. It was going to look uncanny in the Žižkovižkov apartment. Maybe he would put it in a drawer right away rather than wait to forget it.

“Thank you,” Jacob said. He was on his guard. It would only be reasonable for Milena to want to know whether he had enough faith to appreciate the gift.

“It is of church,” she said. She laughed at the clumsiness of her English; she knew that it went without saying that such a figure belonged to the realm of churches. “It is of church we go,” she tried again to explain, gesturing to her children and herself. She didn’t indicate whether her husband went, too. Out of her there then spilled an account in Czech of her church, its location, its architecture, the saint it was named for, the priest who ministered there, and the parishioners who had returned to worship since the revolution. Jacob wasn’t able to follow everything she said and retreated into nodding. He couldn’t tell if the church was something new in her life or something that she was newly free to speak of. He had the sense that it stood for, or stood in the way of, a need that threatened to be overwhelming. In sympathy, maybe in hope of solidarity, he glanced at Prokop and Anežka, but there was no sign in them of resistance, unless they had taken refuge in a mild blankness.

From this blankness their mother released them by declaring that the family was going to go for a walk. Prokop groaned, then ran to get his soccer ball so that the time spent on the walk wouldn’t be a total loss. He began kicking it despite his mother’s insistence that he wait until they were outdoors. Anežka took up her doll
. Then, changing her mind, she asked if she could carry one of the rabbits from downstairs. Halfheartedly and unsuccessfully Milena argued that Prokop should
leave his soccer ball behind and walk quietly and dutifully. To Anežka she pointed out that the rabbit would be frightened by the soccer ball if by nothing worse and might run off.

—But he’s a good boy, Anežka said, in the rabbit’s defense.

“Please,” Milena asked, returning to English, “have you time? We take walk. You with us? For last time.”

“To the church?”

Milena shook her head, as if embarrassed now by her earlier confession.

“I could go for a little walk,” Jacob said, even though he wanted to get home to Milo.

—There is a prospect nearby, Milena said, resorting again to Czech. —It’s possible from there to see far. Are you well enough? I wanted to show it to you. And I will gather herbs for you, so that you can make a tea for yourself. For your cold. She named the plants that she wanted to gather, but even in English the names would have been lost on Jacob. —It will cure your throat, she promised.

Jacob made an effort to look open to believing in the remedy. He was never going to see anyone in the family again, and it seemed important not to disillusion them—to leave them with the impression that he believed in as much as they did—that he might keep the figurine, that he might go home and brew the tea.

Outside, after they had put on their shoes at the foot of the stairs, the group paused while Anežka unhooked the door of the hutch, took one of the rabbits into her arms, petted him, introduced him to Jacob, and regretted that the walk would be too scary for him. Prokop juggled his soccer ball on a foot. When the ball went astray into the garden, where orange squash blossoms were beginning to shrink inward, sensing the removal of the sun’s attention for the day, perhaps beginning the plant’s greater withdrawal into maturity, Jacob said, “Whoops,” and retrieved the ball for him.

Prokop giddily took up the new word as a refrain. Milena shook her head at the ebullience and glanced at Jacob to see if it was trying his patience. She scolded Prokop when he followed his ball into the street, though there were no cars, and Anežka, now rabbitless, joined in scolding him. The group followed the chaotic energy that seemed to be focused in the soccer ball, as if they were being pulled forward by
something that kept slipping out of harness. Jacob was aware that he was still fighting off illness; he had the sense that there was a certain inefficacy to his idea of the world—that his idea wasn’t apprehending the world as firmly as it was necessary to apprehend it—that he and the world weren’t altogether real to each other.

At the end of the first block the group turned left; at the end of the next block, right. They left the neighborhood where the family lived, full of older villas, for a sort of real estate developer’s fallow, a scrub wilderness of oddly shaped vacant lots on the periphery of a newish complex of
paneláky
. Children had beaten a dirt path through the fallow. Milena paused to twist a few purple twigs off of a spindly willow; in a clearing that was still sunny, she picked what looked like tiny daisies. She carried her little harvest in a pouch that she improvised by holding up the skirt of her apron.

The ground grew so uneven that Prokop gave up on his soccer drills. A white boulder ended their path with an appearance of having fallen across it. Prokop was the first to scramble up. Upon joining him, Jacob saw that they stood at the top of a tall escarpment. An eroding slurry of blond rock led downward; far below, the black Vltava wound in a gentle S. Milena warned her children to keep away from the edge, but it was not so steep as to be dangerous.

By suppressing the growth of the scrub trees, boulder and slurry had cut a sightline to the west. The vista to be had through the gap was a pastoral. On the far side of the river, in a bend of it, a green field was being mown. Horses were drawing steel rigs, under the guidance of men with dinted torsos, so distant and so far below that only the facts of horses, steel, and men were discernible. The scene was gilded by the sun, which was low but still full of power. Because no more than the presence of the men could be seen, Jacob let himself stare at them freely, his motive for staring all but invisible. Beyond the field, stretching toward the horizon, waited a forest, over which a blue haze seemed to be settling.

“What’s over there?” Jacob asked.

Milena shrugged. —It’s called Šárka.

“It’s a park, isn’t it,” Jacob said.

—Yes, it’s a valley, she answered.

He thanked her for having brought him to see it.

“Please I must to say something you,” she said in her halting English. “You have free…”

“Freedom?”

“Yes. Is very dear.” She seemed worried by the boldness of her words, and she looked at him as shyly as her daughter sometimes did, despite the whiteness of her hair and despite the matronly bun that she wore it in.

“You’re free here now, too,” Jacob said. “Here in Czechoslovakia.” It felt safer to him to turn away her compliment; he wasn’t sure he understood it.

“Maybe I said not right. You have free”—she paused, having remembered that Jacob had corrected her use of the word, but already having forgotten how he had corrected it; she soldiered on—“free”—she reached out and without touching pointed quickly, in a birdlike motion, at the left side of his chest, wincing as she did so at the temerity and possible rudeness of the gesture—“here. It is not America, in you.
Ne jenom.
”

“Not only,” Jacob translated for her.

She bit a curled index finger as she tried to conjure up more of the words that she needed. Meanwhile, at the front of the boulder, Prokop was throwing pebbles into the vista, and Anežka was helping him by gathering ammunition. It occurred to Jacob that he wasn’t going to get to see the children grow up, but there were a lot of children he wouldn’t see grow up. “You have sensitive…,” she tried again.

“How does being sensitive make me free?” Jacob asked. He had become fairly certain that the opposite was the case.

Milena laughed and shrugged, embarrassed either because she couldn’t answer or because she hadn’t understood his question. “You know things,” she tried again. “Of people.”

Jacob nodded noncommittally.

With some agitation she pointed at his breast again. “You have sensitive sool.”

She must have looked the word up. “Soul.”

“Ah.” She seemed remorseful at having mispronounced it. “And I, too, have sensitive soul,” she continued, “that you will return to us.”

“Maybe you mean ‘impression’?”

“Yes. It is
osud.
”

“
Osud
is fate.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling, taking his translation for concurrence.

Though he hadn’t quite understood, he was reluctant to ask her to explain further. It would have been immodest to ask to hear a compliment repeated, and if her interest in his soul was no more than a pretext for proselytizing, maybe he preferred not to see through it. It was possible after all that she had sensed something about him, even if only a penumbra of the sexual freedom that he had kept hidden from her. And it wasn’t unreasonable to hope that he might return some day. Her mysticism fell in with an idea of himself that he wanted to keep as long as he could—of himself as a person on an errand whose nature was still unfolding. When he left, in a few days, he was probably going to have to give the idea up; in America it probably wouldn’t be salutary to go on imagining that he had an exemption from a more definite, a more disillusioned story. He was willing to leave behind with Milena, or with his memory of her, like a thread left behind in a maze, the possibility that his errand could somehow persist despite his abandonment of it, in a disregarded state, incomplete unless someday he found a way to come back to it.

*   *   *

—What if I were to write you a letter, Milo suggested.

—Well, I’d look forward, Jacob replied.

It was Saturday, the day chosen for the swimming party at Šárka. The two of them were seated aboard a tram that was clattering steadily forward, unimpaired, in accordance with its nature as a mechanical thing, by the heat that they were passing through. Earlier passengers had opened all the windows of the car, and by the tram’s motion a wet air was drawn in, which buffeted ineffectually against their faces, knees, and arms. Jacob had set his backpack on a seat, but Milo was too well mannered to make use of any more seats than the one that he was sitting in, even though they had the car nearly to themselves. Milo’s towel was slung over one of his shoulders, and he had begun to sweat a shadow under it, as well as a circle in the front of his shirt.

They were traveling along the road that led to the airport. There seemed to be more placards advertising rooms than Jacob remembered having seen when he had come this way with Melinda half a year before, to pick up Carl, though he wasn’t confident of the accuracy of his memory or the precision of his earlier observation. He wondered if the bus tomorrow would take him along the same route.