Necessary Errors: A Novel (32 page)

“I’m partial to the amber biscuits there, the ones on the tray to the right. I don’t know what’s in them. Butter, I suppose.”

“They look dry.”

“Do you think so? I quite fancy them.”

When they arrived at the head of the line, the woman greeted Annie warmly.

“Dobrý den!” Annie replied, girlishly. She pointed at the cookies she wanted and asked for three, please, in Czech. —And I want…, she continued, still in Czech, but then broke off. “How do you say it, Jacob? My friend will say it for me.
Moment,
” she pleaded. “
Va-
something, isn’t it?”

“What do you want to say?”

“Happy Christmas.”

“
vá
veselé vánoce a
rok,” Jacob supplied.

“You can’t be serious,” Annie said.

“I said for New Year’s, too.”

The woman returned the wishes directly to Annie.

“Tomorrow I’m going home,” Annie explained. “
.”

The woman smiled regretfully.

“Oh, do tell her though that I’m coming back.”

Jacob ordered some meringue cookies for himself.

“They aren’t her daughters,” Annie commented as they walked to the eastbound tram stop. “I asked.”

A tram came quickly, its bell trilling as it stopped for them. They took seats in the back. It was thought rude to put a bag on a seat, even if a tram was mostly empty, so they put theirs between their feet and held their wrapped cookies in their laps.

The tram pulled away, along the white gray of the road and under the dark gray of the sky. Lower clouds were moving across a field of upper ones, like fingerprints on the glass of a window being raised. The tram passed into the factory district, and Jacob found himself trying to look at the ugly roadside walls of metal and cement through Annie’s eyes. Soon he would be trying to look at them through Carl’s.

“Ehm,” she began, “is he very small then?”

“You can close your hand around him. Or I can.”

“You have quite large hands, don’t you. Mine are dainty. Ladylike, you see. So he isn’t at all like a rat.”

“Not at all.”

“No tail, for instance. I’m quite fond of animals generally, mind. But not a rat.”

They were passing a factory of timepieces, and Jacob pointed out a triangular mosaic of oversize clock faces on its façade, underneath the company name in stocky lettering.

“I think I’d rather you didn’t hand him to me or anything,” she pursued. “Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

“I did want to see you. I haven’t seen so much of you lately.”

“I stopped seeing Luboš.”

“Oh? I thought perhaps you might have done.” When he didn’t say more, she asked, “Are you looking forward to the arrival of your friend?”

“He’s just a friend.”

“Oh, a friend,” she echoed.

“He’s straight.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t. Will I like him? Is he going to shake my hand in a hearty manner?”

“Hail fellow well met.”

“Yes, that’s what you call it. Making ‘deals’ and such like.”

“No, he isn’t like that. You’ll like him.”

“I expect I will. I expect one likes your friends.”

“Look,” Jacob said. They were passing the one entrance to the locomotive factory where you could catch a glimpse of it through the gates. A wet road twisted downhill into a huddle of soot-stained buildings, and three chimneys handed milky smoke into the lowest layer of cloud. After the monotony of the walls that hid the factory, the view was startling, as if one had hiked over a mountain ridge and discovered a city in the next valley. The tram didn’t stop, and so the sight was taken away as quickly as it had been given.

“It isn’t any wonder you fell sick with that next door to you.”

“It’s like looking at the nineteen thirties,” Jacob said.

“A spot of nineteen thirties in a landscape of nineteen forties.”

They found Václav safely imprisoned. He hid when their shadows fell on him, but Jacob put his hand into the cage with some seed, and the animal emerged and began to stuff the food into the pockets of his mouth.

“It’s not like you,” Annie said.

“The hamster?”

“How will you take him back to the States? Not like you not to plan for that, I mean.”

“He can fit in a cigarette pack. But it’s a long way off.”

“He’s quite lovely.” She bent over, her hands folded between her legs, to study him. “An absurd name. I think I will just put my hand in and try to touch him, perhaps, if you don’t mind. You don’t think he’ll bite, do you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He doesn’t seem the sort.”

She held her hand beside the creature and talked to it in a high voice as if it were a kitten. It let her stroke its back a few times, then made a few rabbitlike hops to the protection of its pile of shredded paper.

“It has a lovely soft coat,” she said, holding the hand that had
touched it in her other hand. “You won’t mind if I wash my hands, though? You won’t be offended?”

They brewed tea. Though it was only late afternoon, the light was beginning to fail, and Jacob turned on the small chandelier over his kitchen table.

“I can’t stand that everyone is leaving,” he said. Melinda was driving Rafe to London, where he was to meet her mother. Thom was returning to Edinburgh by a series of trains and the ferry. Henry was taking a bus to Spain to see a three-year-old daughter whom none of them had known that he had, as well as the ex-girlfriend who had borne her, with whom he was still on friendly terms.

“We’ll be back soon enough,” Annie assured him.

“The Stehlíks have invited me upstairs for the day itself. Which is the eve, here.”

“Your friend isn’t coming until after, I take it.”

“No.”

“It will be different when he does come. One is quite cozy at the
, with Thom just down the hall. Though I see less of him now he has Jana. He is useless, really, as a cook, but he is willing to do the washing up.”

“I guess it will be different.” There was a kind of attention exchanged between people when they lived together, and he expected that with Carl there would be a lightness to it, and even a tenderness. The conversation would draw Jacob out of himself. “I’m not in love with him.”

“Of course not,” Annie said, thinking in her case of Thom.

“The most I ever said to myself was that I wished I had a lover
like
him.”

Because their memory of the sun was fresh, the light from the bulbs of the chandelier seemed faint and dim, and in such a light it seemed safe to talk. “Sometimes,” Jacob volunteered, “when I’m here alone, it’s as if there isn’t anything in my head at all.”

“Yes?” she said. She had been warming her hands around her cup, and now she pressed them against her cheeks. “Do you know that sounds a bit peculiar.”

“I just lie in bed and watch the sun move across the blanket. Not impatiently.”

“You’d like to be a writer as well, wouldn’t you?”

“As well?”

“Henry fancies himself a writer, but I don’t know as he does any writing.”

“What about you?” Jacob asked.

“I mean to, but the days go by, don’t they. Your saying so made me think of it.”

“I keep thinking I’ll write something about my friend.”

“Which friend would that be?”

“The one who…”

“Oh yes. Would you like to come to Dublin with me, by the way? It’ll be a fine time.”

“What would I do with Václav?”

“We get along quite well, my mother and I. I know it’s usual for people to row with their mothers, but she and I never do. She’s a very tolerant person.”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m not worried. It is an offer, if you like.”

Her concern embarrassed him, and he wondered what had prompted him to mention his moments of idleness. They weren’t a source of anxiety; they were somehow pure. Maybe he was afraid of losing them. He decided to try to write something while his friends were away. That would be a good use of the time, he thought. In the event, however, he didn’t write a word.

*   *   *

In the new year, Carl arrived.
airport was on the other side of the city from Jacob’s apartment, at the end of a long and tedious journey by tram, subway, and bus. Though Jacob himself had arrived in the country by train, he had been to the airport once before, to pick up a package of books and clothes that his mother had sent by freight mail. On that trip, he had waited in line for his package in a basement office, where half a dozen women had sat talking and eating their lunches amid ringing telephones. From time to time, one of the women silenced the phone at her desk by sightlessly lifting the receiver an inch from its cradle and then replacing it. After a while someone asked Jacob what he wanted and then told him that his package was probably in an adjacent garage where packages were sorted into heaps according to day of arrival.