Necessary Errors: A Novel (43 page)

“He was literally in love with them? He was gay?”

“If you like,” Kaspar replied, indifferently.

“Did they know before he wrote? What did they say when they found out?”

“His letters were for them a sign of the cruelty of the world. They welcomed them, but they could not answer, in their philosophy.”

“They never wrote back.”

“They wrote back, but they could not answer. Perhaps I do not have the right word…”

“No, I understand.”

“It was a thing of chance for them. And so he continued to write. The letters are very painful and very beautiful.”

Jacob silently considered translating Kaspar’s writer into English some day. “Are you making good progress?” Jacob asked.

“It is in its way helpful to be sick. I don’t know if I could else finish the translation, it pays so little.”

Jacob remembered the days he himself had spent in bed reading, but he said only, “You shouldn’t be sick.”

Kaspar shrugged away Jacob’s concern and changed the subject: “You have a new friend, Melinda says.”

“I knew him in America.”

“You are close.”

“Not so close.”

“But he lives with you?”

“I arranged for him to stay with me.”

“Is he too a writer?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob answered, but then he remembered what Annie had said. “Maybe he is.”

“And you, do you write of your friend?”

“Carl?”

“Is that his name? But I meant the young woman.”

“No,” Jacob lied. In fact he made notes some evenings, after Carl was in bed, but they hadn’t amounted to anything. He stared around Kaspar’s room, as if in search of another topic of conversation. “Perhaps I’d better go,” he ended.

“As you wish,” Kaspar accepted.

*   *   *

Carl learned that the Canadian embassy had set up a social hour for its citizens—a bar, really—on Thursday nights. He wanted to go, and so one Thursday, the friends met at Melinda’s apartment, Rafe still absent, and walked together to what Carl called the “Canadian club.”

It was in a coal-dusted cement building on Národní
, a building that for some reason lay mostly empty. Its elaborate, arched mouth led in to a
pasáž
.

“It’s in here?” Jacob asked. Behind a crisscross metal barricade, fine dust had settled on the interior courtyard’s pavement like a light snow.

“No, upstairs, I think,” said Carl. He turned right and led them up an echoing staircase into the building proper. On the third floor, at a door through which they heard American rock music loudly played, he knocked. There was no answer, and after a polite interval, Carl himself opened the door.

A dull roar washed over them. They pushed their way into the crowd. A few desk lamps lit a bar; the rest was dim. “Oh my god,” Carl said. “We could be in Cleveland.”

“Do you like it, then?” asked Annie, yelling.

“It’s
great,
” Carl answered.

“And so he justifies every fear you ever had of him,” Melinda said to Jacob, a confidence she could only share by shouting directly in his ear.

“What’s that?” Carl asked.

“I was saying how considerate of you Americans to go to such lengths to share your culture with us.”

“What?”

Melinda repeated herself.

“But these are
Canadians.
”

“Canadians are
subtle
,” Jacob yelled. Melinda mimed enlightenment.

“A beer?” Thom offered, gamely, and they all nodded. Carl went with Thom to fetch them.

The drinkers around them seemed as heavy as they were loud, though it may have been the thoughtless certainty with which they held their positions against traffic that gave the impression of weight. Since there was no coatroom, many of the men were wearing their coats despite the heat of the room, and many of the women were carrying theirs folded over their arms before their bellies, adding an impression of bulk to their figures. It almost seemed to Jacob that he and his friends were the only humans in a room full of heavy machinery. His friends fell silent; to make oneself understood required so much effort.

“It’s horrid,” Melinda shouted in his ear after a time. “
Why
did he bring us here?”

In the general blare, the undertones of her voice were lost, and since Jacob ordinarily depended on them to gauge her seriousness, he turned to search her face. To his surprise, she looked fragile. It occurred to him that surrounded by strangers, in a room where it was all but impossible to speak, she may have felt the loss of the weapons she was accustomed to fighting with. Even her personal beauty seemed muted, perhaps because it was not a habit with her to draw on that weapon consciously. Beside her, meanwhile, Annie had withdrawn into herself and was staring blindly into the buzzing air.

“It’s like an American bar,” Jacob answered, inadequately.

“We do have noise in London, you know,” Melinda replied. “And beer.”

“Maybe he’s hiding,” Jacob suggested. It was awkward to think out loud at such a volume.

“There’s such a thing as excess of caution.”

“Do I look
so
miserable?” Annie asked. She had been trying to read their lips.

“We weren’t discussing you, darling,” Melinda responded.

“No? I was certain you were.” It seemed to please her to be disabused. “What were you on about, then?”

At this moment, Carl and Thom returned. “Bloody poofs here,” Thom swore, and Jacob froze for a second. “Drinking beer cold.”

“Thomas,” Melinda said, on account of his language.

“Out of their ‘icebox,’” Annie contributed, “though I quite like the word ‘icebox,’ as it happens.”

“Cheers,” Henry saluted, and they matched his salute.

“Are there any Czechs here?” Jacob asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be gathering in public.”

“No Czechs,” said Carl. “This place is a jihad magnet.”

The friends gave up talking for drinking. Jacob found it odd to see so many expatriates from North America and to know none of them. They appeared to be the sort who never stepped out of the context they traveled with. “Who are they all?” he asked Carl, who shrugged. Carl seemed to be making a show of his interest in them.

At last Henry announced, “I think perhaps it’s an early night for me.” It was only the end of the first round.

“For me as well,” Melinda at once concurred.

“I’m not to be left here,” Annie said with alarm.

The friends quickly found themselves in the corridor outside, where it was quiet and they could talk freely.

“Don’t let us drag you away,” Thom said to Carl.

“It was awful, wasn’t it,” Carl conceded.

“Jacob did warn us that you were a bounder,” Melinda continued. “What was the word. A rogue.”

“Melinda,” Jacob muttered.

“Can I at least walk you home?”

“Me?” asked Melinda. “It’s just three streets away.”

“Will no one walk me home?” Henry interjected.

“Poofters right and left,” Thom observed regretfully.

“I’ll walk you home, Henry,” Carl made believe. “But U
is just around the corner, isn’t it?”

The group was relieved that Carl had thought of it. They descended to the avenue and turned into the wind, toward their old haunt. Henry and Carl led the way. When Annie stopped to fasten her coat and fell behind, Jacob dropped back to keep her company. He stamped his feet for warmth.

“I’m
coming
,” she said. “Is it true that all bars are like that in America?”

“I think so. I wouldn’t know as well as Carl.”

“Aren’t your kind like that as well?”

“I guess they are.”

“I don’t hold it against you. I don’t even hold it against Carl, really. He seems quite taken with Henry, doesn’t he,” she said, nodding ahead, and added, hypothetically, “You aren’t jealous.”

“Carl is free to have arguments about aesthetics with people besides me.”

At Na
, they turned the corner that housed the gallery where Jacob and Luboš had seen the work of the children’s book illustrator. It was empty now, between shows. Jacob wondered what the next show would be. He noticed that he wasn’t sentimental. In fact he was disloyal, he told himself; he was careless. He didn’t point the gallery out to Annie, and he didn’t say anything about the cart man selling
párky
a
block further on, where the avenue ended and the raised cobblestone paving kept out cars. After all, he and Annie were going to turn before they reached the cart. “I heard that your little club is to have a meeting,” Annie resumed. “The one with Henry.”

“On Wednesday night.”

“I suspect Henry’s quite a good writer. Otherwise I shouldn’t care to join, I don’t think. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t like to read your writing, and Carl’s too, if he would let me. But if it were just you and Carl, it would be your private thing, wouldn’t it, living together as you do.”

“Chastely.”

“I have your word for it. But Henry makes it a group.”

“Oh, Annie. Just come if you want to so badly.”

“But Henry doesn’t want it, you see. He as good as said as much.”

“Did he really?”

“In so many words. It wasn’t anything to do with me, he said. He would be embarrassed, because it’s rather blue, what he writes.”

“Blue?”

“Blue. Off. But I’m not a prude, so I’m not certain I believe him. I mean, don’t you think it’s no more than a piece of gentleness—something to put me off with? He is quite gentle, you know, in his way.”

It was too delicate for Jacob to meddle with. He didn’t want to have Annie excluded, but there seemed to have been a negotiation of some kind between her and Henry, and he hesitated to tamper with it.

Once inside the familiar warmth of U
, the friends again teased Carl for having led them astray with the Canadians. “One brick of Semtex in there,” Carl joked in return, “and capitalism would never come to Czechoslovakia.”

“A whole brick wouldn’t be necessary,” said Henry. “You can cast it quite thin. That’s why it does so well for letter bombs.”

“And who told you all this, Henry?” Thom asked. “Your friend Hans?”

“One
sheet
of Semtex,” Carl modified.

“They power the detonator with the battery from a piece of Polaroid film.”

“Ingenious,” said Carl.