Necessary Errors: A Novel (45 page)

“In a port city,” said Jacob. “That’s why I thought sailor.”

“Am I to answer now?” Henry asked. “It could be the same person. Or it could be different people even within the same sentence.”

The friends made an effort to accept this comment. “I thought it was the same guy,” Carl said. “Can I say that? I like there to be a story. I like it that you’re with the woman, and then you escape, and then you’re in Marseilles or wherever. The Hague.”

“Not bloody Czechoslovakia at any rate,” Thom said. “If I may ask another question, at the risk of bollixing everything up again: Are we to understand that the woman dies?”

Henry shrugged, to indicate that he had left it up to the reader.

“The story is kind of violent,” Jacob hazarded.

“Mmm,” Henry agreed. A tight smile suggested a certain pride. It occurred to Jacob that Henry might enjoy their disconcertment. It might be an effect he had sought.

“But I don’t know if the source of the violence is anger,” Jacob continued. He didn’t know that the source wasn’t anger, but he wanted there to be another explanation. He wanted to defend Henry from the
evidence he had placed in the record against himself. It had been placed there as art not confession, Jacob reminded himself.

“Do you like it at all?” Henry at last asked Jacob directly.

A pause. “I do.” He thought he could safely answer in the same challenging spirit. “But it isn’t
for
me, is it. It’s kind of a joke on a reader like me.”

“How so?”

Jacob saw with relief that his point was general not personal, and he continued: “Kaspar was saying something to me about surrealism, where the surrealist pretends to take the side of the machine, to show that no human can ever really take the side of the machine. He shows it as if despite himself. He wants his intentions to be misunderstood, maybe even by himself. And there’s something like that here.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I mean that a reader like me wants a story, and you’re playing the game as if there are only sentences. And I’m going to look even harder for a story because of that.”

“The story is like the machine,” Henry suggested.

“No, it would be clever of you to argue that, because then you could hide your tracks even deeper. But no. The story is of you and milady and the landscape. And you want to convince us there is no story.”

“And why should I try that?”

“Because the story itself is the wall with the broken glass,” Jacob saw, as he was speaking. “It’s the story itself that cuts you and makes you bleed. I don’t know if any of what I’m saying is ‘true,’ of course.”

“Which story, then?” Henry considered. “This one, or the one you think I’m really telling?”

“This one, this one. This is the way you tell it.”

“As if it cuts me up to tell it.”

“And you cut it up. And yet it’s an ecstasy for you.”

Carl objected: “He could have written a different story.”

But Jacob insisted: “Any story that he tells this way, this is the story that he tells.”

“And if he tells it conventionally,” Carl asked, in a skeptical tone, “only then is he free to tell something else?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob somewhat retreated. “Maybe. Maybe a broken story is always about a writer’s relationship to story.”

“I don’t buy that,” said Carl. “Everyone has a relationship to story.”

“Then every story is about the writer’s relationship to story.”

“Now how does that work.”

“So you, for instance, aren’t showing us yours,” Jacob answered Carl. “That’s your relationship to story right now.”

“You like to skate close to the edge, Mr. Putnam,” Carl said. Jacob liked hearing it.

Henry returned to the discussion: “But if every story is about story, then every story must also be about something else, as well, something other than itself, or what are stories for?”

Thom broke his silence: “That’s where milady comes in, I suspect.”

“She’s
the
story,” Jacob declared.

“‘
The
story’?” Henry echoed.

“‘I love her.’ ‘She loves me.’ ‘I don’t love her.’ ‘She doesn’t love me.’”

“Is that always
the
story?” Henry asked.

“Almost always.”

“And I’m against it,” he said, sounding out the truth of Jacob’s claim in his own voice.

“You are aware of the confinement. Of the violence.”

“But you’re leaving something out,” Carl broke in. “Because there
is
something episodic, something unattached, even in a story kind of story. Beneath story.”

“The demon,” Jacob said, to his own surprise.

“The demon?” Carl repeated.

“The rogue,” Jacob said, trying again.

“Oh, the rogue. But isn’t he a story, too?”

“A wrecker of stories.”

“But that’s just more story,” Carl pointed out.

“Hang on a minute,” Henry broke in. “I quite like that, about the demon.”

“I don’t know where that came from,” Jacob admitted.

“He’s the one who’s never caught by a story,” Henry said, taking up the thread himself.

“Or he’s always caught and he always escapes,” Jacob suggested. “Maybe he’s the one you were trying to write about.”

“He might have been.”

Carl interrupted by rising from the table to pour himself a glass of
water. He rinsed his beer bottle first and left the water running while he set the bottle with a faint click on the floor of the pantry where they were collecting an array of empties. When he took up an empty glass and touched the tap to feel through it the temperature of the water, Jacob had the impression that he too could feel the cold of the metal on his fingertip, because he had touched it that way so many times himself.

“It’s about being in love,” Carl said.

Henry shrugged again, to allow the possibility.

“Who are
you
in love with, Henry?” Carl continued.

“Weren’t you listening?” Thom asked. “He’s in love with a woman in a castle surrounded by wolves.”

“But I’m not to be walled up there,” Henry himself joked. He folded up his pages. “Well, thank you for this,” he said, and eyed each of them in turn. “For the interpretation.”

*   *   *

That weekend Jacob insisted on going to Vyšehrad, the old Czech castle grounds just south of the city’s downtown. He was to meet Annie and Melinda there, and at the last minute Carl accepted an invitation to come along.

At the Vyšehrad stop, there were shadows before and after the subway’s posted name, where letters from its old name had long sheltered the metal beneath from dirt and weather. Once Jacob noticed the shadows, the word they formed became legible even beneath the letters of the new name; until last year, the station had honored Czechoslovakia’s first Communist president.

“There they are,” Carl said, of their friends.

Jacob hadn’t yet got his bearings. In a moment, though, he was able to follow Carl’s gaze. At the top of a flight of glassed-in stairs was Annie, a cream angora scarf knotted around her neck, a pine-green hat failing to contain her hair, and a scuffed canvas backpack, crammed full for the expedition, looped over one shoulder. Beside her, Melinda, less careful but more elegant, held in the grip of thin, bright red gloves a hat of white yarn with a pompom, a property of Annie’s that she was in the habit of borrowing. She seemed to be hesitating to put it on.

They took turns exchanging kisses hello.

“Is it this way?” Jacob asked. He had unfolded his blue city map, which these days he kept flat against his handkerchief in a back pocket.
Since he had given up men he had taken up geography. He visited a new sight or a new neighborhood nearly every weekend. “Is this it?” he asked, pointing through the plate glass at a concrete landscape. “Did they pave it?”

“This is the Palace of Culture, so-called,” Melinda said. “Vyšehrad is farther on. Shall we?”

They stepped out onto the ungiving white plateau, which was angry with winter sun. “We’re high up,” Carl noticed.

“On a cliff, I’d say,” Annie commented. A highway bridge of the same white concrete stretched north from the subway station and spanned a valley of villas and bungalows. They could see no way of descending to the valley; the elevation seemed to confine them to the concrete plinth of the Palace of Culture. The palace itself was a bleak vault of pale marble and brown-tinted glass. It focused the wind, which pushed and shoved them as it blew past, buffeting the hollows of their ears with a sound like that of a luffing sail.

“
Is
there culture? Should we go inside?” Jacob asked.

“It was for party congresses, and now I believe trade shows and such like. Rafe dragged me along for a function once, I can’t remember what. I can’t say I recommend it.”

“Rafe is returning tonight, isn’t he,” Annie said, reminded of the news by the mention of his name.

“Oh? Mr. Stehlík just came back to our house,” Jacob said.

“That’s the father?” Melinda inquired.

“He yelled at us,” Carl volunteered.

“He yelled at
me,
” Jacob corrected him.

They came to the end of the white cement and tumbled off the corner of it into a regular Prague street of shops and family dwellings. The wind softened, and it became easier to talk.

“What were your crimes?” asked Melinda.

As they walked, Jacob described the bell and the string he had persuaded
to install, and then described how Mr. Stehlík had stormed through Jacob’s bedroom and into Carl’s that morning; pointed a finger, crooked as if he couldn’t bear to straighten it, at the bell on Carl’s bedside table; and asked, “Mr. Jacob, what is it please?”

“And what did you say?”

“Je to jenom
, a díra už tam byla.”

“Darling, ‘
’ is a bit much.”

Jacob translated for Annie: “It’s only a tiny little bell, and the hole was already there.”

“He shouldn’t have minded,” Annie loyally said, “if the hole was indeed already there.”

“I think your speaking Czech made it worse,” Carl said.

“He didn’t like it that we offered to pay him, either.”

“You were offering to pay for what, exactly—indulgences?” Melinda asked. The vulgarity of their offer seemed to delight her.

“We’re American,” said Carl. He made it seem unsporting to resist appearing crass.

“Mr. Stehlík said he had waited ten years to get a phone,” Jacob concluded.

They came to a ruined stone gate, patched on top with a red chalet roof. It marked the outer limits of the castle grounds, and though they could have walked through abreast, they walked through in single file, the women preceding. On the other side, low grassy banks sheltered the road, which felt less like a road than a path. As the road curved, a finger of sun touched them, though too lightly to bring much warmth. There didn’t seem to be any groundskeepers, perhaps because it was midwinter. There was no sign of any other visitors, either.

“It’s a gorilla problem,” Carl ventured.

“Is that an American term?” Melinda asked.

“It’s a term of my own devising,” he said. “It’s when an argument isn’t rational because it’s really about deciding who’s the top gorilla.”

“Jacob was challenging the man’s authority,” Melinda said, as she followed the line of thought.