Necessary Errors: A Novel (76 page)

He and Milo walked up the broken escalators of the Malostranské station behind two conscripts in uniform. Each conscript’s cap, neatly folded, was tucked into the buttoned-down epaulet loop on his jacket’s shoulder, above where his stripes would go if he ever earned any. Jacob wondered if conscripts were instructed to carry their caps this way or whether it was a perennial innovation, which every cohort came up with by themselves. The conscripts took the steps lightly and steadily, their faces unflushed, their voices not winded. In a crowd, conscripts always looked healthier than their fellow citizens. Jacob didn’t think it was only on account of their youth. Was it the effect of regular exercise? Maybe the economy had been planned so as to give them a better grade of food.

—Must you go into the service sometime? Jacob asked Milo.

—That’s how Dad found out. I told him, that I didn’t have to.

—Because you’re gay.

—Many say it. So he can’t be quite sure.

—A pity.

—It isn’t.

—A pity, I mean, that you had to present yourself as…

—As I am.

—Well, yeah, you have the truth. But your friends from university, what with them?

—A lot are in the service, Milo admitted. They were arriving in the glass box that topped the subway station. —But I thought to myself, that at the moment there are opportunities, and I have to make use of them.

They headed down the long blank street where Milo had a week or so before shown Jacob the door to the Renaissance gardens. They walked past the door this time. They crossed
. A few minutes later, they came to the American embassy, a Prague palace that Jacob’s country had somehow infused, in occupying it, with the national qualities of blandness and force.

—When my friends went off to the service, I got to know Ota.

—Downstairs? Jacob asked. The word had been one of Ota’s ways of referring to T-Club.

—Downstairs, exactly.

Two American soldiers, armed but in relaxed postures, stood in a driveway that led under an arch to gardens in back of the embassy, which were forbidden to visitors. The soldiers paid no attention to Jacob and Milo, even though Jacob, made a little hungry by the sight of men who were such types of blandness and force, stared at them and at as much of the gardens as he could catch a glimpse of. On the sidewalk, a dozen or so Czechs were in a line, waiting with familiar patience to file visa applications.

—I remember, said Jacob, —that he was funny, when I met him.

—He’s witty. Such friends I didn’t have before. And even if…

—Even if?

—Nothing, Milo backpedaled. —I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s complete shit, what I was going to say. The street twisted sharply as it climbed a hill. —We’re living through a time of changes.

They didn’t need to look back at all of them. —I still have his cassette, Jacob said.

—Of what?

—Depeche Mode.

—That is fearfully typical of him.

Beyond the embassy, the street ran along the crown of an escarpment, curved left, and turned into a grassy path that led into
. Nothing sheltered Jacob and Milo from the midafternoon sun, and they were conscious that they remained visible to any one on the street behind them. The castle overlooked them, far above, and anyone looking out a rear window of the American embassy could also have seen them. Out of caution, it wasn’t until the path began to wind between trees, which were burgeoning with green, that Jacob took Milo’s hand. Milo didn’t resist. It was a weekday afternoon and the park was empty. They were once again in a version of what Czech speakers of English tended to refer to as “the nature.” It seemed to be Milo’s instinct to bring Jacob into it.

—Here are apple trees, Milo said, using a word different from the one for the fruit, though similar enough that Jacob was able to recognize it.

Jacob backed Milo up against one of them. He remembered the dark, clear bark from orchards in Grafton.

—It isn’t a bother? Jacob asked, after he kissed him.

—It isn’t a bother, Milo replied. He tugged at the hair at the back of Jacob’s neck, which had grown a little long. —You need a clipping.

—Do you know how?

—Absolutely not. But maybe you want to be a longhair.

After a while Jacob noticed that they were walking among a different kind of tree, which had blossomed so recently and so abundantly that papery and translucent petals were still scattered in the grass below.

—Cherries, Milo explained. —When I was a little boy, Mother liked to come here, when the flowers for the first time open.

—It’s pretty.

—Now they’re gone by. You’ll have to return, if you want to see them.

It wasn’t a thing that could last, Jacob told himself, for the sake of discipline. Milo suggested they sit down in the sun.

—How is the school, which you will attend in the fall? Milo asked.

—It’s English literature, but it’s not important.

—No?

—I’m going to be a writer, he reminded Milo.

—And you won’t need literature?

—I’ll write my own.

Because he was going to leave, he had been keeping himself on good behavior. Since it wasn’t going to last, a lifetime of effort wasn’t necessary, only a couple of months—a matter of weeks, really—and he was better for this moderate exercise of willpower, he was sure, than he had ever been before. But because it wasn’t going to last, it was just as feasible to get away with bad behavior—to be in some ways worse than he had ever been before—to let Milo think he was someone he wasn’t, for example, or wasn’t yet, in any case—to play out what was between them as if it were a daydream of getting everything he wanted. As if the story could be made to run according to his wishes, free of all checks. One day, when he was a child, he had been playing with another boy in the backyard of his parents’ home in Houston, and he had made something up. There had been a sprinkler; the boys had been wearing their swimsuits. He had invented a game. Did it go back as far as that? He had put his arms around the boy. The leaves of grass in Texas lawns were paler and fatter, less mixed with the straw of what died in winter.

—Will you sell to the films?

—For millions.

—Maybe you will write me letters, between your novels.

—Maybe, but I will be very famous.

—But right now you’re mine, Milo asserted.

—Yes, Jacob quietly admitted. —You see?

—An opportunity of the moment.

He was deceiving Milo for the sake of the look in his eyes.

*   *   *

Everyday life continues during a love affair, though it loses any power to be menacing. One sees it as if from the other side of the room. It can’t issue verdicts or decide meanings and becomes for the interim no more than something to appreciate or humor, as the case may be, unless the lovers on a whim choose to bring a moment of it inside the boundary, invisible to others, that has been drawn around them.

Jacob paid no less attention to his teaching but he no longer worried about it. At the language school, whenever his students couldn’t guess a word’s meaning, he liked to draw a picture on the chalkboard. His drawings used to be clumsy, but suddenly he seemed to have a knack for them, which he recognized, when he studied himself a little, as no more than a new, happy indifference to whether the drawings came out so badly that his students laughed at them—as sometimes they still did.

A lover’s detachment fell in conveniently with a complication of mood that had come over the city. Before Jacob’s arrival, the story of the revolution had held everyone tightly, he imagined, but the season of late spring that they were now passing through was not the first to follow the revolution but the second. The revolution was receding into the past; its grip as a story was weakening. There was a general sense of unraveling, of drift, of inconsequentiality. In their thoughts people were beginning to go their separate ways. It wouldn’t have been tactful to make too much of it; there was no point in throwing the fact of differentiation in anyone’s face. It went largely undiscussed.

It was perceptible, though, in new patterns of life. Catercorner to the new bakery where Jacob had begun to buy cornflakes, one day a new butcher’s shop appeared, where it was possible to buy fresh pork chops and beef steaks, as well as better grades of sausage than the government-run shops kept in supply. When the bakery had opened, a crowd had rushed in to try it. But no crowd gathered at the new butcher’s. There
were now so many new shops that no single one was any longer a matter of general public interest. The butcher’s prices were fairly high, and it was beginning to occur to people that not everyone would be able to afford every new shop that opened. Some shops were going to be for some people; others, for others. Some shops would be reserved implicitly for special occasions, which would come at different times to different people. One’s pride was at stake, and as a measure of prudence, one had to begin to think a little more narrowly, keeping in mind one’s personal wishes and means rather than those of the average worker—the ideal customer that the old shops, in their uniformity, had been addressed to.

It contributed to Jacob’s awareness of the dispersal that the end of the school year was soon going to break up his classes at the language school. He was going to miss the regularity and sense of purpose they provided, as well as the students themselves. For a month now, the editors of the Charles University student newspaper, the ones who Rafe had introduced him to, had been putting off their sessions from week to week pleading the need to prepare for exams, and at this point Jacob no longer expected to meet with them again. Though the academic calendar didn’t affect his other private students, the new restlessness did. One day after class at the chemistry institute, the well-dressed Pavel rose and with a certain deliberateness shook Jacob’s hand.

“I must thank you,” he said. “I have a new post, and I believe that English was of assistance.”

“You spoke beautiful English long before I arrived,” Jacob replied.

“I am not so sure.”

“Congratulations, though. What’s the job?”

“I will be a senior research designer in composite materials. It is with an Austrian firm, in Linz.”

“Don’t they speak German?”

“I happen to speak German also, but I believe, that they appreciate my English.”

In order to listen in, the pretty Zuzana had delayed getting up from her chair. Now she observed, “He is brilliant in languages and in chemistry, Pavel.”

“He is too young to know German,” complained the elderly Bohumil, who had also been eavesdropping. “He is too clever for his age.”

“And you, for your age,” Pavel retorted. “Bohumil also speaks German, very well.”

“Everyone of my generation speaks it,” Bohumil said, swatting away the compliment. “One had the impression here, for a while, that it was going to be the
Weltsprache.
”

Jacob wished Pavel luck. Ivan lingered; he also had news. Over the weekend he had met with a young businessman who had a new idea. He proposed to teach through television; after all, there was one in almost every home already, even in Czechoslovakia. The man would very much like to meet Jacob. He was perhaps Jacob’s age. Could Ivan bring Jacob to his office?