Necessary Errors: A Novel (36 page)

“Who are they, darling, can you tell?” Melinda asked Rafe.

“Students and artists, it looks like,” he answered. “Czechs; no Westerners.”

“Are we conspicuous?” Jacob asked.

“I like to think I’m always conspicuous,” Rafe said. Standing as they were in shadow, it was hard to know how to understand the note of cheeriness in Rafe’s voice. There was a suggestion of effort in it, as if he were trying to set a tone. What light there was caught only in his loose hair, and his face remained dark. “Do you need a job?” he asked Carl abruptly.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“It’s very generous of you—”

“I haven’t offered yet.”

Carl chuckled politely. “I may look around, but I’m only planning to stay a few months.”

“That’s clever of you. I don’t know why none of us thought of that.”

“Never say never, I suppose,” Carl answered, trying to match Rafe’s casual manner, but not quite managing to. The darkness and the sense of being sequestered underground seemed to have brought the group into an unintended intimacy. They felt themselves being studied by one another, even though it was impossible to see where a person’s eyes were looking.

“There’s plenty for everyone,” Thom declared, as he and Henry returned with a round, in bottles.

“Would
you
like more work?” Rafe asked Jacob privately, after they had all toasted one another. It was another private English class, he explained, in this case a group of college students who edited a political weekly. They had been the first to print a certain rumor during the revolution. “It wasn’t true, of course, but it was very bold of them all the same.”

“Why did they print it if it wasn’t true?”

“They thought it was. Somebody was spreading disinformation. Somebody inside the StB, apparently. Nobody can quite figure out the motive.”

“And these students spread it further.”

“Quite innocently,” Rafe smiled. “The boys, we call them. Melinda has taught them, too, but neither of us has the time, anymore.”

“Thank you.” If it paid as well as the chemists’, Jacob would be able to drop down to half-time at the language school.

“Nonsense. Thank
you
, for taking them off my hands.” He took a swig from his beer in his loose-armed, careless way. There was an awkward pause between them, on account of having transacted business. Melinda had gone off with Jana, who had learned there was a restroom after all. “Quite a setting,” Rafe commented. “The real Czech underground, as it were.”

Jacob let his attention wander into the surrounding crowd. The partygoers had stationed their supply of beer in a corner of the monument—there were two words for “corner” in Czech, Jacob had recently learned; it
was usually
roh
when understood from the outside, and usually
kout
from the inside, though not always—and their talk was echoed by the two perpendicular concrete walls nearby so sharply and quickly that it was beyond Jacob’s skill in Czech to follow any of it. Even if he had been able to see distinctly, he didn’t think he would have been able to parse the meaning of clothes and expressions as well as he could in T-Club. The partygoers were straight, after all. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, that was a false assumption. They were young; they were his age, mostly. They were excited, with the selfish happiness of people who have pulled off a stunt together, and that energy would be a kind of ring around them, he knew, that would lock him out, at first, if he tried to test it, but if he were able to break into it somehow, if he were able to think of something to say that took their interest, the party might become a place where he could meet someone, perhaps someone who was gay but for whom gayness wasn’t the beginning and end of himself, who had first suspected it of himself, as Jacob had, not so long ago, who thought of himself mostly just as someone attracted to people who were playful, inventive, and gentle.

For now, though, he was a stranger. He noticed that Henry was standing beside him and seemed to be waiting to say a word. “Have you seen the art?” Henry spoke into his ear. He pointed east, where at a distance there were a few more faint lights. “It appears to be a kind of installation.”

The two of them struck out across the dark together. Henry’s pale hands and the bluish whites of his eyes seemed to flutter in the air beside Jacob. The lights that they were approaching were on the ground, pointed up toward white masses, and as Jacob watched his steps, the low angle of the light, falling across the hillocky dirt, made him think of a beach at night lit by a bonfire. When they came close, the white masses resolved into shapes in papier-mâché: an oversize skull and skeleton, the bones crowded into a jumble, with the skeleton’s neck at a sharp angle, as if, even in this enormous space, the remains had had to be crammed in to make them fit. A large cap and a large hammer and sickle lay on the ground before the skull’s hollow eye sockets.

“Oh, it’s
Stalin
,” Henry chuckled. “We’re meant to be in his tomb with him.”

On closer examination, they saw that there were in fact several
skeletons, and all of them were inside a sort of wire mesh cage. At first Jacob thought that the cage was to protect the art from its audience, but on second thought that didn’t seem in keeping with the evening’s spirit.

A tall, unshaven man saluted them and borrowed a Petra from Henry. “Can we ask him?” Jacob said. —Please, would you be able to explain it to us? Is it Stalin’s grave?

The man shrugged, as if this was a high price for the cigarette he was fingering. —What have I to explain? Here is Mr. Stalin, here is his monument, may he rest in peace.

—If it isn’t a bother…, Jacob persisted.

The man sighed noisily. —Well, yes, it is Stalin’s grave, he told them, speaking and smoking in practiced alternation. —And something else. In the cellar of every
panelák
, every family has a locker, with such a grille, and there they keep flags and banners and such shit for the First of May and Victorious February and the Anniversary of the Great October Revolution and so on. So this is sort of the locker of the government, see, and they kept here Mr. Stalin and the rest of the line for meat, until they forgot about them.

“What’s the line for meat?” Jacob asked Henry, as the man returned to his friends.

“In the statue, before they tore it down, Stalin was leading three or four workers, and the Czechs always said it looked like they were queuing up at a butcher’s shop.”

In the still air, the smoke from their informant’s cigarette hung about them, and Henry tried to wave it away. The effort made his hands cold, and he blew on them. “He’s a sharp fellow. He’s the one who did the Trabant on feet in Old Town Square.”

“He wasn’t so friendly, though.”

“Oh, did you think that was the artist? I thought that was just a wanker who wanted a fag.” There were more works of art farther on, but Henry excused himself. “Enough for me, thanks.”

Jacob continued his walk alone, but he found that the rest of the exhibition was not as good. Either it was so abstract as to be without resonance—triangular panes of glass suspended from wires, for example, under a title like
Viewpoints IV
—or it was morbid without the touch of humor that gave the Stalin skeleton its charm. Over the course of the year, Jacob was to find in his visits to galleries that a morbid
solemnity was typical of the less-talented emerging artists. The tone seemed to be a reaction to the new freedom—both an exploration of it and a way of taking refuge from it. Such artists were like Western teenagers at the stage when they are impressed with the discovery that pain and suffering are real and may be spoken about. They were boring because of their honesty.

He turned back toward the corner where he had left his friends. He was tired and a little drunk, and he stumbled a couple of times but didn’t fall. He realized he was growing impatient with the care that was necessary to walk safely, and when he recognized his impatience he paused. In the dimness he closed his eyes. Beneath the murmur of the partygoers, he heard the watery emptiness of the cave that they were in. It seemed to be spinning slowly around him. A year ago he had been in America. Two years ago he had been straight. Tonight he was underground, with the remains of the bogey man, lit by the torches of the children who had killed him.

“Jacob? Are you all right, darling?” Melinda asked.

He opened his eyes. “Fine,” he reassured her. She was with Carl, who also looked concerned.

“There’s sod all in the way of fresh air down here,” Melinda suggested.

“I’m fine,” he repeated.

“And we’ve been smoking up what there is of it,” she continued.

“That’s a good idea,” said Jacob, and dug his cigarettes out of his pocket. They declined his offer to share but then watched him light up with the attention of children outside a pastry-shop window. They declined a second offer, too, however.

“I was wondering if it might be possible to meet someone here,” Jacob said, in an effort to make his daze seem less mysterious.

“That’s the spirit,” said Melinda.

“Is it very open here?” Carl asked.

“Not really.”

“It
is
changing,” Melinda suggested, but then she hesitated. “Isn’t it? I suppose I don’t actually know.”

“I can’t tell,” answered Jacob. “Are you getting along with everybody?” he asked Carl.

“Your friends are
so
lovely.”

“Oh, good.”

“Thom? He’s adorable. And Annie’s so sweet. She’s a little sad, isn’t she?”

“I
don’t
think I should be hearing this,” Melinda interrupted. “You will excuse me.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

“Absolutely not. I ought to check on Rafe in any case.” She began to walk away from them.

“Be careful of the gopher holes or whatever they are,” Carl called after her.

They watched her step from mound-top to mound-top, bringing her feet together after each step, like someone crossing a brook on a series of stones.

“And Melinda?” Jacob asked, when they thought she could not hear.

“She, I don’t know, she draws you out. Is that it? Do you find that she does that?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“We were looking at the sculpture.” He gave a sharp laugh as he nodded toward it.

“What?” asked Jacob.

“Nothing, nothing. I wasn’t prepared for your friends to be so charming.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, I told her I taught English as a second language in America, and I hadn’t come all this way just to do more of it. That’s all. It wasn’t any more than that.”

Carl sometimes joked about what he called his “enlightened shortsightedness”—about his reluctance, as a matter of philosophical principle, to sacrifice the self he was now for the sake of a self that it would be prudent someday to be. It was one of the traits that had made Jacob wonder if Carl was as straight as he seemed to be, and even after Jacob came to understand that it had nothing to do with sexuality, he still loved Carl for it. It was a kind of nakedness, and it set him apart from Jacob’s schoolmates, all of whom had seemed to measure their lives against an ideal career.

“It’s different here,” Carl continued. “Not knowing what you’re doing.”

“Being here is what you’re doing, when you’re here.”

“And that’s how it should be, everywhere. But here it actually seems to be possible. Maybe because the city is so beautiful? Somehow it makes me really sad.”

“It is sad.”

“Jet lag, probably.”

“Because it can’t last. It’s already over, really. The revolution.”

“Oh,
that
,” Carl said with mock shallowness. “But I’m talking about my
feelings.
”

Jacob wished he could hold Carl’s hand. He had never really felt any wish stronger than this for Carl, he told himself. “I’m glad you’re here,” Jacob said. “None of them know what it’s like not to be in America.”

“What it’s like to know true freedom.”

“I hope you’ll stay,” Jacob risked.

They made their way back to the crowd.

“A crisis in supply approaches,” Thom warned.

“Can I get you one?” Carl offered. Jacob accepted.

“It’s bloody cold in here,” Melinda complained.

“Is it?” asked Annie. “I don’t seem to notice it.”

“You’re shivering, darling.”

“Am I? Perhaps I am.”

“I asked him, you know,” Melinda told Jacob.

“Asked him what?”

“What he had come for. To test your speculation.”

“And?”

“‘To see.’ You Americans turn out to be so open-ended. I understood you all to have goals.”

“We have ideas, as you say.”

“Mmm,” she agreed.

“What’s this?” Rafe asked.

“There’s an attempt to figure out Carl,” Jacob answered.

“The orphan,” Rafe said. “Melinda’s very good with orphans.”

“I don’t think he’s an orphan,” Jacob protested.

“Kaspar isn’t an orphan, either, technically,” Rafe continued. “He has that father.”

“I don’t think many people are as lost as Kaspar,” Melinda said.

“How is Kaspar?” asked Jacob, forgetting that he had ever been angry with him.

“I’m afraid he’s ill. He didn’t teach this week.”

The friends finished their last round quickly. When they emerged from the cave, they saw that a few stars had been able to pick their way through the glare cast by the city’s lamps and by the new snow, which lay on its domes, towers, and gables. The snow whitened the streets, too, except for a pair of iron rails that the night tram kept fresh and black. From the top of Stalin’s hill they could look down at the city’s beauty as if they, too, were dictators or kings. Annie took Jacob’s arm, and they negotiated the stone steps together, slowly.

“I don’t want any more romance, for a little while,” Jacob volunteered.

“It isn’t always necessary, is it.”

“I didn’t tell you,” Jacob continued. “He was selling himself.”

“Oh?” Annie replied, as if she might need more explanation, and then, as if on second thought she decided she didn’t want any, she added, “That is dreadful. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t tell Melinda.”

“No? I won’t, then. I don’t believe she tells
us
everything.”