Necessary Errors: A Novel (46 page)

“Jacob’s mistake is to think about the problem, when he should be thinking about the gorilla.”

“Then can you use the phone at all any more?” Annie asked.

“Not while Mr. Stehlík is in town, I don’t think,” Jacob said.

“Shame,” Annie said.

They came to a second gate. This one was a sort of grand façade set across the road, with no building behind it. Set in the façade above the passageway were three relief cartouches, two of them apparently empty. “Is that all there is to it?” Melinda asked of the structure, skeptically. Beyond the gate, the sloping banks that channeled the road were
taller, and in the shade of them she shivered. “Tell me again, why is it we’re here?”

Wind slowly bent the bare, fine-fingered trees above them and fluttered a short-trimmed, chartreuse lawn. “It’s part of my quest,” Jacob answered.

“Would you take my scarf,” Carl suddenly said to Melinda, irony absent from his voice.

“Oh, please,” Melinda refused.

“I don’t need it,” he said, unwinding it.

“I’m a married woman, more or less. I can’t go about borrowing men’s scarves.”

“My nana knitted it,” Carl assured her. “Your nose is as red as a button.”

“How awful,” she said, covering her nose. “In that case, then.”

The scarf was long and loosely woven, mostly grays and whites, but sprinkled with red and royal purple. Carl made as if to wrap it around Melinda by circling her, but she tugged it out of his hands—“I won’t if it’s to be my winding sheet”—and allowed it to drape her only loosely, so that the line of her neck was still visible.

“It is fetching,” Annie said. “Will your nana knit me one, do you think?”

“It’s dashing,” Carl declared.

“Oh, well, ‘dashing,’” Melinda half mocked.

Carl’s throat was left open to the air, and the women noticed a pendant he wore, which Jacob had often noticed but had never asked about. “Is there a figure on it?” Melinda asked.

“Saint Christopher. The patron saint of travelers.” He drew it out from beneath his shirt. It was made of a dull, light metal, a cheap alloy, and it was about the size of a nickel.

“Was it given you?”

“I picked it up in Paris. In a religious shop near the Luxembourg Garden.”

“I thought you might have won it in some way,” Melinda explained. While she fingered it, he stood very still.

“Like a medal,” he suggested.

“Yes. Or as a love token,” she said, dropping it.

The openness of the flirtation was their permission. Melinda seemed
to enter into Carl’s game with perfect naturalness—to catch his way of handling feelings with doubled irony. Maybe it had always been her way, too. Jacob watched her turn away and hike ahead as if she had no interest in standing close to Carl any longer than she already had, no interest in tucking back into the neck of his shirt the pendant that he was now tucking back in himself, the metal once more against his skin. Jacob was sure that nothing was going to happen between Carl and Melinda—he was as convinced of that as he was that something sweet and painful now attached them. He wouldn’t have been very good at talking about his impression. If asked, he might have said he “felt bad for them,” but he would have sensed, in saying this, that the formulation was wrong or at least inadequate, because in another way he felt good for them; he was glad they felt alive, as they must have felt if in fact they felt anything like what he imagined. Of course there was no need to talk about it—no need for the two of them or for anyone else—no need that couldn’t be put off. It was like what he had said to Henry in their writer’s group. There was such a thing as a resistance to story. There was even a pleasure in resisting it, a somewhat violent pleasure—and then there was the pleasure of having the two of them near him, the pleasure he took in their beauty, as his friends, which was like a wealth he shared in, without any responsibility for it.

They passed a simple round building of white irregular stone. A belfry just as simple, round, and white rose from the center of its roof.

“Are we here because of the radio, by any chance?” Melinda asked. “It’s just that there isn’t that much to see.”

“The radio?”

“You hear the tune on the radio every morning, at least I do.”

“I don’t have a radio,” Jacob said.

“Well, then, you would do, if you did have one. I believe they play it every hour on the hour.”

“No radio,” said Annie thoughtfully. “I quite depend on mine.”

“No radio, no telephone,” Melinda observed. “No mod cons whatsoever in
, are there.”

“We have a hamster,” Jacob said.

“Not traditionally considered an amenity.”

“But what is it they play on the radio?” Jacob asked.

“‘Vyšehrad,’ darling. The little harp number.”

“By Smetana.”

“Well yes. It’s quite pretty. You know, the plinking one. Arpeggios.” She gestured instead of trying to sing them.

“Oh, is that what it is?” said Annie.

“A sentimental favorite. And I know that Mr. Putnam has a weakness for sentiment.”

Carl reported that there were more buildings ahead.

“I didn’t say there was
nothing
here,” Melinda said. “It’s just that most of it was knocked down long ago.”

“It’s the Stalin monument of the fourteenth century,” said Carl.

“Always the
bonmoty
with this one,” Melinda appreciated.

They came to a sort of plaza of dead grass and frozen winter mud, where they halted. At the far end was a dark, two-spired church and beside it, to the right, a walled yard they knew to be a cemetery. “I believe Smetana himself is in there,” Melinda hazarded. To their left, a squat yellow building was labeled as a museum, but its grille was locked and the lights were off. In the matter of interpretation, they were left to their own devices. Scattered in the fields were a few pieces of statuary, for the most part in the decorative, conservative style of monuments from the First Republic, except for one statue close to them, which appeared strangely modern: three rounded pillars rose from the earth and leaned loosely together. The pillars looked from a distance like concrete but on nearer inspection they proved to be stone.

“We’re asked to believe that these are from the Neolithic,” Melinda said, interpreting a plaque.

Jacob also translated. “It says the three stones were unburied in the first decade of the twentieth century.”

“And buried just two months before that, no doubt,” Melinda joked.

“But what are they?” Annie asked.

“An omphalos, probably,” said Jacob.

“A what, dear?” Melinda asked.

“A bellybutton of the world.”

“I didn’t know it had one.”

“There was one in ancient Greece, I think. To mark the center.”

To mark the place, Jacob continued to himself, where spirit came into the world. A kind of scar. Was this it? he wondered. Was this as close as he would come? He would have come sooner, if he had known
about it. He realized his heart was racing, but he was afraid his excitement would seem ridiculous if he tried to explain it to his friends.

“I don’t much care for it,” Annie said. “Druids and such.”

“Why not?” Jacob asked.

“I can’t say exactly. It’s a bit doubtful, though, isn’t it, worshiping trees and rocks.”

“Do we know that’s what they did?”

“We don’t know anything, really, do we. All those years and years, and rocks are all that’s left. It’s depressing.”

Carl and Melinda started off across the fields together, Jacob and Annie following. Ruts and footprints had been frozen into the earth, and as they stepped they could sometimes feel a ridge crumble softly underfoot.

“It’s their Stonehenge and their Westminster Abbey in one, then, what with the cemetery,” Melinda said, “which has all the nation’s poets and the painters.”

“Do you ever wonder what you’ll be some day?” Carl asked. Jacob and Annie could hear him but he wasn’t addressing them.

“Sometimes,” Melinda gently answered. “What a thought.”

“It sounds a little grand,” he apologized.

“But we must all become something.”

“Advise me,” he appealed to her.

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“What about you? What are you going to become?”

She put him off at first, but after a few minutes, she let him ask the lesser question of why she had come to Prague. She had come with Rafe, of course. That didn’t mean she hadn’t thought for herself, but she tried to make light of the thinking she had done, in the joking way that Carl made light of things. She wasn’t quite able to. She said that in going abroad one wanted adventure and one didn’t want it, and that there were costs on both sides. Even this modest confession seemed to embarrass her a little. Jacob sensed that she was reluctant to put into more precise words what her expectations had been, because she didn’t want to be exposed to disappointments that she had so far been able to overlook and which, in so far as she was still able to overlook them, might be thought of as not yet quite existing. It was for men to have careers, in particular American men, she joked, but she didn’t seem to expect her joke to be
believed, not least because there was little sign of a career in Carl. One sensed, with both of them, that neither felt that anything had been promised, but that they were waiting, nonetheless, for possibilities that they weren’t yet ready to give up on. They were holding out for recognition, for the hope that the lineaments of what they were looking for would be as familiar and resonant as a person’s.

“And what will I be, do you think?” Carl asked, returning to himself.

“I should think you would do well as a flâneur,” Melinda suggested.

“Excellent,” he answered.

They found that the church was shut indefinitely for repair. The cemetery was, too, though without explanation. They turned back to the lawns they had just crossed and wandered among the statuary for lack of anything else to see. “I think somewhere there’s a path that leads to Libuše’s bath house,” Jacob volunteered, but his suggestion of looking for it found no takers. The statues weren’t originals but concrete replicas, clumsily made. They had been cast in pieces, and the mortar joining them had discolored at a different rate than the concrete, so that a gray princess was bisected at her waist by a yellow zone, sloppy where the mortar had been smeared into crevices. Her left hand, gracefully extended, was heavy at the wrist, in a way that suggested that beauty of line had been sacrificed for stability of concrete—a narrower wrist might have been too likely to snap.

“It’s for stunning carp,” Melinda said, and brought her own wrist down as if administering a blow.

“Oh, it’s Libuše herself,” Jacob said, reading the statue’s caption.

“Who’s she, then?” Annie asked.

A youth with a hammer sat at her feet and was turning his head as if to follow her gaze. “She was to be queen,” Melinda explained, “but the Czechs refused to be ruled by a female, so she chose this peasant as her husband, and made him king.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Annie. “I should think she would have just chopped off their heads or what have you.”

“I suppose she would have done in England,” Melinda said.

“Look at his hair,” Jacob said. “He’s the pretty one in the couple.”

Carl agreed. “She’s a little vague around her…”

“Mmm,” said Melinda. “Whereas his robes cling to him in rather a nice way.”

Jacob moved on to dutifully inspect the other statues. Annie trailed him for company, and when he found a path, she agreed to explore it with him.

“Don’t be long; it’s cold,” Melinda ordered.

The path had been kept clear by a light service vehicle of some kind, whose wheels had marked it with a double rut, and the trees on either side were saplings and scrub.

“Are you certain this is part of the gardens?” Annie asked.

“No,” Jacob admitted, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in continuing. He noticed cross-paths through the thin woods where people had taken short cuts. In the shelter of the woods there were islands of snow, but where the snow was crossed by footpaths, the ground had been tramped clear. He wondered if men came here to meet in the evenings. He hoped the idea wouldn’t occur to Annie. Of course there was no one here now but his friends.

“I did think at first that you and Carl would make a couple,” Annie said. “I suppose I hoped it for your sake. He’s very fine.”

“I’m glad you like him.”

“I hope Melinda won’t be too hard on him.”

“He kind of forces her to be.”

“He doesn’t seem able to help himself, does he. How was it the other night? With the poetry club?”

“It isn’t poetry.”

“You know what I
mean
.”

“It went well. But I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“I didn’t ask, did I. I didn’t ask anything particular. So it went well. That’s lovely.”

“Oh, don’t—”

“I’m not, am I. I’m not. It’s
your
poetry club. I don’t suppose what Henry wrote was really so very ‘sexual,’ after all.”

“I think it’s more the emotions he wants to keep private.”

“Oh, he has emotions, has he.”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he repeated.

“I won’t
tell
, Jacob.”