Necessary Errors: A Novel (30 page)

“Please,” Ivan said, and escorted Jacob down a hall. They walked
past several signs forbidding visitors, past the entrance to what seemed to be a cafeteria, and through a set of double doors into a large conference room.

*   *   *

A gaudy, mildly asymmetric chandelier of chrome and glass, which would not have looked out of place at the top of a Christmas tree in an American shopping mall, hung over a long oval table of dark-stained maple. The bulbs of the chandelier were reflected dully in the table’s polish, and as Ivan led Jacob to the front of the room, this irregular constellation slid along the surface as if following him. The eyes of the institute’s chemists also followed. The chemists were sitting in deep, leather-cushioned chairs, winged with side headrests like the chairs of astronauts in movies. Ivan, who looked about thirty, seemed to be one of the youngest in the group. The oldest, in their seventies at least, wore white lab coats and were sitting together at the table’s far end; they politely suspended a conversation as Jacob entered. Thick curtains blocked the daylight from a row of tall windows. Behind Jacob there were carefully washed blackboards.

“This is a nice room,” Jacob said, trying to make the best of its heaviness.

“It was the director’s, but we have no director now,” said a tiny old man. His hair, dyed black, was neatly parted and combed, and the frames of his glasses were made of black plastic and steel. As he spoke, in a high and for a Czech unusually musical voice, with an almost German accent, he gestured with his liver-spotted hands. “Now it is the people’s.”

“Not the people’s,” corrected a man in his forties a few seats to the right of Jacob. He was wearing a suit that actually seemed to fit him, but he slouched in his chair and as he spoke scowled at his notebook like a teenager, as perhaps the effort of speaking English made him feel that he was.

“The people’s of chemistry!” the old man revised, and there were chuckles around the room, and whispers of surreptitious translation.

Ivan posed a grammatical question: “Is it correct to say ‘the people’s of chemistry’? Or should it be ‘the people of chemistry’s’?”

Jacob repeated the two phrases aloud. “Neither, actually,” he decided, and the chemists laughed as if this were a great joke. “I’d get
around it by saying, ‘It belongs to the people of chemistry.’ Or, ‘It’s the scientists’ rather than the administrators’.’”

“The administrators,” the man in the nice suit echoed, still scowling, as if Jacob had just taught him the name of his enemies.

“This room is too fine for science,” said a plump old woman. She spoke very slowly, summoning up each word with a separate breath. The room was obliged to wait for her, and Jacob felt the pity that one feels when an older person tests a group’s patience without meaning to. The many lines in her face were soft and hesitant, like her voice. “We will ruin it,” she continued, “with our dirty fingers.” When she reached the last word, she smiled with relief at having finished and with pleasure at her own joke.

“What did they keep in the cabinets?” asked another chemist, swiveling in his chair with childish speed to point at a wall of them at the back of the room. The abstract quality of speech in a foreign language seemed to be making them giddy.

“Bones!” cried the tiny old man.

“The bones of the people of chemistry,” said the man in the nice suit.

“The bones,” the tiny old man resumed, in a further refinement, “of former administrators!”

Jacob asked the chemists to introduce themselves. They gave their first names, listening to one another attentively, while he jotted down a seating chart. The tiny old man was named Bohumil; the plump old woman, Zdenka; and the man in the suit, Pavel. Some spoke English brokenly; others, fluently, even expressively. Pavel, for example, spoke it as easily as he wore his suit, but with a certain brusqueness, as if his ease with such surfaces was an accomplishment he had until recently been holding back and he still suspected that he could be attacked for it. Whenever he spoke, in the hour that followed, his scowl caused Jacob to worry that he was losing patience with the lesson, but Pavel never said anything to confirm this interpretation.

Jacob chose a lesson he had recently given to one of his intermediate classes, about the way word order changes when a question is embedded in another sentence. The chemists listened to a taped dialogue; they read from photocopied pages that Jacob passed around. As an exercise, they
were then to take turns acting out a simple dialogue in pairs. One person was to ask his partner about an item, and then the partner was to ask why he was asking.

Jacob had learned the language teacher’s trick of selecting prompt words with an unexpected relevance. “The potatoes,” he prompted Ivan, who, proud of his role as Jacob’s escort, had seated himself beside Jacob.

“Frank, do you have the potatoes?” Ivan asked, anglicizing his neighbor’s name.

František, an older man, considered. “Why are you asking,” he began, and looked to Jacob, who nodded in encouragement, “me,” and waited for a second nod, “if I have the potatoes?”

“Great,” Jacob said.

“Because I cannot buy them in the store,” Ivan answered.

“The data,” Jacob said, hoping it was a word that the chemists used in their workaday conversations.

“Pavel, do you have the data?” asked a woman who, though young and pretty, wore a white lab coat as otherwise only the older chemists did.

“Why are you asking if I have the data?” Pavel returned, and he gave the line a hint of petulance, as if he really were a well-dressed man bickering with an attractive woman.

“Because the instruments are not accurate,” the woman said. The group hadn’t been expecting an extra line of dialogue from her, and they laughed.

“Pardon me,” said Pavel. “Can you say, please, what is the difference between ‘accurate’ and another word, ‘precise’?”

“What the difference is,” Jacob corrected, to stall for time.

“Ah yes. It is a question inside a sentence. Then, can you say what the difference is?”

Jacob felt the chemists’ eyes studying him. “Precise. Accurate,” he repeated, but he couldn’t hear the answer in his own voice, as he sometimes could. “Is there a difference?” he asked himself aloud.

“A colleague told me, that there was a difference,” Pavel said. He sounded anxious, as if he were afraid that Jacob might call his question foolish.

The room fell silent. Jacob wondered if it was a test. It occurred to him that since the chemists were paying him out of their own pockets, they had a right to find out if he knew what he was talking
about. This might be the first time any of them had tried to exercise such a right.

“The colleague and I were discussing a number,” Pavel continued, all the while frowning. He did not look willing to release Jacob from the question. “I said that the number was accurate. He said, ‘Yes, of course, but is it precise?’”

Jacob saw the answer now, and in his relief also saw his questioner more clearly. Pavel’s hands were trembling. His question was a sort of public confession. He had been left at a disadvantage in a contest with another man, and he had carried the memory of the conversation with him for a long time afterward, the way a child carries a parent’s incautious remark if it senses that the parent will be reluctant to explain. He was not trying to test Jacob. He was hoping that Jacob would be able to pull the sting.

Jacob came up with an example. “Suppose that my temperature is thirty-nine point two.” He wrote the number on the blackboard. “If my thermometer says forty-one”—he wrote that number on the blackboard and then crossed it out—“it’s not accurate. If it says thirty-nine,”—he wrote a 39 beneath the crossed-out 41—“then it’s accurate but not precise.” He then added a decimal point and a 2 after the 39, and circled the full number. “But a reading of thirty-nine point two is accurate
and
precise. Thirty-nine point two five would be even more precise. And so on.”

Pavel nodded. There was a buzzing at either side of him as the words for temperature and thermometer were translated and as the scientists reminded one another that American numerals had periods where Czech numerals had commas.

Ivan raised his hand. “And if the thermometer says forty-one point seven eight, it is precise but not accurate?”

A few moments ago they had doubted Jacob; now he was in danger of becoming their oracle. “No,” Jacob pronounced. “I would know what you meant if you said that, but no. A precise measurement is always an accurate one.”

Pavel fell back into his astronaut’s chair. “I am accurate when I say that the words ‘precise’ and ‘accurate’ are the same. But I am more precise when I say, that they are different.”

The pretty young woman beside Pavel held her head for a few
moments in perplexity. She dropped her hands into her lap when she understood. —That’s it, she congratulated him in Czech.

“Let’s get back to the exercise,” Jacob said, and they allowed him to return their attention to word order in interrogative relative clauses.

Jacob proposed dialogues about eggs, a car, and privatization coupons. When he proposed tickets, however, Bohumil, the tiny old man, whose turn it was, asked, “May I choose another word?”

Jacob allowed him to.

“Zdenka,” Bohumil said, turning to the plump old woman, who happened to be sitting beside him, “ask me about the girlfriend.”

The old woman blinked calmly and sat up straight in her chair. Jacob was afraid that in her preoccupation with the mechanics of the grammar she might not have noticed Bohumil’s introduction of the premise for a joke.

“
A
girlfriend,” Jacob corrected, but the correction came too late for Bohumil to respond without interrupting Zdenka.

“O Bohumil, do you have,” began Zdenka, in her labored way, “
your
girlfriend?” She had tried at the last minute to avoid Bohumil’s mistake.

“A girlfriend,” Jacob corrected again.

“O Bohumil,” she began over again, “do you have
a
girlfriend?”

“Good!” said Jacob.

“Why are you asking me if I have a girlfriend?” Bohumil quickly replied.

“Good,” Jacob praised him, to be evenhanded.

Bohumil continued: “Who told you?” Some of the chemists chuckled.

“Because,” Zdenka answered, with the fingers of her right hand stretched out in anticipation, “she left keys.”

“Her keys,” Jacob supplied. Evidently Bohumil knew who he was joking with.

“Because she left her keys,” repeated Zdenka, at her own indomitable pace. “Is it now to me?”

“It can be your turn, sure.”

“Is it my turn?” she corrected herself, before proceeding. “O Bohumil, ask me about a boyfriend.”

“Zdenka, do you have a boyfriend?” Bohumil turned to her as he asked the question and looked at her over his glasses for added effect.

“Why are you asking,” Zdenka responded, not returning his gaze but sitting erect in her chair, with grandmotherly innocence, her eyes fixed on a spot in the ceiling, “me if I have a boyfriend?” She took an extra breath. “I, too, have a girlfriend!”

Over the outburst of further laughter and of commentary in Czech, Bohumil asked Jacob, “How do you say,
osvobodit,
osvobozená
?”

“Liberate. Liberated.”

“My wife is a liberated woman,” Bohumil said proudly.

“Aha,” said Jacob.

“And she is young and pretty,” Zdenka concluded, beaming with her triumph, “my girlfriend.”

“It’s like vaudeville in here,” Jacob observed.

“Czech vaudeville,” said Bohumil. “Do you know Voskovec and Werich?”

“No,” Jacob admitted.

“Ah, you would like them, I think. They were First Republic.” He folded his hands thoughtfully. “Like us,” he added, pointing to himself and Zdenka.

“Will you tell us something about yourself?” Ivan asked, a little plaintively. “Since how long are you here?”

“How long have you been here,” Jacob corrected, though he saw that teaching had become a lost cause. “Since August.”

“And are you a teacher in America?”

“I don’t know what I am in America.” There was a murmur as the remark was translated.

“We, neither,” Pavel put in, in his deeper voice. “We do not know what we are, in the new Czechoslovakia.”

“I thought you were chemists.”

“We are chemists now,” said Pavel. “But the future…?” He spread his hands.

“We are researchers,” one of them volunteered. “It is not business.”

The room fell silent for a few moments. They had come to the lesson to distract themselves from the uncertainty in their lives, but the uncertainty was present here, too.

“And how long do you stay?” Bohumil asked, politely.

“I’m not sure.”

“Until we learn English,” Bohumil decided for him, to the group’s approval.

*   *   *

When Jacob’s homeward tram paused at the metalworks, he noticed new graffiti on the corrugated siding that hid the factory from the street. He looked into his French-Czech dictionary for the words he didn’t know: they turned out to be the words for “Christmas” and “oranges.” Last week oranges had appeared in the
ovoce a zelenina
near the Stehlíks’ for the first time since his arrival, shrink-wrapped in groups of four on white Styrofoam trays. The label had said they were from Syria. He had bought a package and had eaten the fruit eagerly. Two days later, he had returned and bought more. He had felt confident about his greed for them, as if he were setting the Czechs an example. He tried to assemble the words in the graffiti into a translation. Until now, all the political graffiti that he had seen had been left over from the November revolution. It had referred to Havel and to Civic Forum, the movement that had put Havel in the castle, and there hadn’t been much. Graffiti was one of the things he had come too late for.

O
UR CHRISTMAS PRESENT: ORANGES FOR SIXTY CROWNS
, the line of graffiti read. T
HANKS, MR. KLAUS!
When Jacob had bought his oranges, he hadn’t noticed the price, and it took him a moment to understand that the line was ironic. Klaus was the finance minister, and he was beginning to let things cost their true price. Their free price. Had Communists painted the graffiti? The only thing the oranges had put into Jacob’s head when he ate them was the hope that there might soon be bananas, which he could hardly remember the taste of. He pictured Communist strategists sitting around a table—a table like the one where he had just been teaching the chemists English—conspiring. Capitalism—the presence of oranges, at any price—was still fragile here. There had to be sacrifices, Jacob thought. The high prices were temporary, and in time economic growth would reward everyone. Of course it wasn’t Jacob who was making the sacrifices. He found himself wondering where the oranges used to come from. Maybe Cuba had sent them, at Warsaw Pact prices. There couldn’t have been very many, in that case. He would give Václav some when he got back. A part of him thought: There may be Czech children who can’t afford to eat oranges for lunch this winter, and here I am planning to feed one to a hamster. Only a corner of a segment,
though. It was the first time Jacob had been away from him for so long—for seven hours, he counted. He had left the cardboard tube of a toilet paper roll in his cage in case he wanted something to gnaw on or climb.