Necessary Errors: A Novel (78 page)

“Arbát?” Hans echoed. His face took on a stubborn look. “No, that is shut now.”

“These are from the stand-up place in Lucerna,” Henry explained.

“But do you remember Arbát?” Jacob insisted.

“More or less,” Henry answered.

Hans for his part turned away. It occurred to Jacob that Hans might think that Jacob intended to tease him—to make a remark about, say, the triumph of McDonald’s, which would no doubt arrive in Prague
soon and which happened to share Arbát’s color scheme. He studied Hans for a little while but he couldn’t think of a way to repair the misunderstanding, if in fact there was one.

“Do you think I could teach children?” Annie asked Jacob, leaning over the table to consult with him. “Very young ones, I mean. Such as you have done, with the children of that student of yours.”

“Sure,” answered Jacob.

“You don’t find it too difficult, do you. I must ask Jana if she thinks it would be of interest to a Czech mother. To have a native speaker as an instructor.”

“It’s a good idea.”

“Then if something
should
happen to the language school…I rather like to be in the company of children’s voices. They’re quite cheerful. Soothing, even. Like little brooks or something. I know it’s what people say, but it’s also true, you know. I should think a small number of them would be quite pleasant to sit and talk to, of an afternoon.”

“I’m sure they would be.”

“Yes,” said Annie, agreeing with herself and seeming to see the picture in her mind’s eye.

Jacob wondered if he was remembering places like Arbát in anticipation of leaving—if he was assembling a map of the city in his memory, so as to be able to revisit it later. It was strange to realize that one couldn’t know in advance which places one was later going to wish to remember. He didn’t really need to remember Arbát, for example; it hadn’t turned out to be very important to him. Maybe someday he wasn’t going to think that Prague itself had been very important. What was it going to represent? Especially now that he had learned to take it so casually, as if it were an interlude in a larger story, whose outlines he didn’t yet know. Would he remember this room, for example? A large, white, underground room, furnished with low, flimsy card tables and filled with the smells of cigarette smoke, dancers’ sweat, and spilled beer.

*   *   *

The smell of Milo’s hair, in bed beside Jacob in the morning, was a little like the smell of butter. More delicate, maybe, if that were possible. Jacob missed it when Milo wasn’t there, though when Milo was there, it embarrassed Jacob that he noticed it.

—Would you want marmalade again? Jacob asked. —Not cornflakes?

—Something a little sour is maybe pleasing to me, Milo answered. —For a change, after a night with you.

—You ox, Jacob said.

Milo got out of bed and tugged on his boxers and socks. Jacob wondered if he should buy him a pair of slippers. A spare set of slippers was probably the Czech equivalent of a toothbrush left at a lover’s apartment in America.

At the Country Club Annie had mentioned that Kaspar had had a mild relapse. The news had reminded Jacob of his promise to visit, and after breakfast, he walked to Vršovice, hoping to find Kaspar at home.

The door to Kaspar’s characterless white building was unlocked; maybe the key that Melinda had loaned him for his earlier visit hadn’t really been necessary.

“Come, come,” Kaspar said when Jacob knocked, hurrying Jacob in as if he had been expecting him.

“Annie said you weren’t feeling well,” Jacob began.

“The carcass still moves.” Something had been exciting Kaspar; his eyes shone. His card table had been pulled to the edge of his bed, where, around the nest where he had been sitting, several dictionaries lay open. Evidently he had been translating. “I have been wanting to ask you a question. Where does God exist, do you know?”

“That’s your question?”

“Isn’t it a question?” For a moment Kaspar looked a little frightened and searched Jacob’s eyes.

“Do you mean, is he in heaven or is he everywhere?”

“He is not everywhere, I think.”

“Why do you think I know?” Jacob asked. “I don’t even know
if
he exists.”

“No, he does not exist everywhere,” Kaspar replied, as if Jacob’s attempt to evade the question contributed to answering it. “Shall we have tea?”

Jacob nodded. Kaspar shuffled in his old-bear way over to his electric pot, filled it, and clicked it on. There was nowhere to sit, unless they were both going to sit on the bed. The aluminum folding chair, like the card table, was covered in scratched-up typescripts.

“I felt it, this time,” Kaspar continued. “I felt that I am not able to find him alone.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

“When I was in hospital.”

“Oh.” Jacob thought of the mystical experience that he had shared with Henry but Kaspar’s forwardness filled him with so much skepticism and mistrust that he pushed his own memory away. “Do you want me to clear a place?”

“But we shall sit in my garden.”

“You have a garden?”

“I have had long conversations with you in it.”

“I don’t think so. I had no idea you had a garden. It was winter the last time I was here.”

“Was it so?” Kaspar sadly asked. “In winter a garden is less attractive,” he reflected. “But they recommended the air of winter to us. To strengthen our lungs. In the time of history. How do you say, in English, ‘in the time of stories’? In Czech it is quite poetic. They say,
‘Bylo nebylo
.’”

“‘There was and there wasn’t,’” Jacob translated.

“Do you say it also in English?”

“No. You say, ‘Once upon a time.’”

“Oh yes. I had forgotten. I will make a tray of this,” Kaspar said, closing a dictionary, “if you will carry. For me it is too heavy. Do you like? It is of Rafe and Melinda.” He was taking pieces of a blue-and-white tea service out of a cardboard box on the floor. “For good-bye. She alone presented it, but she was at pains to name him, and so I had to find him.”

It occurred to Jacob that Kaspar might be chattering because he had a fever. “Are you all right to go outside?”

“But it is summer almost. It is not so cold as this cave. The sun slays the bacilli.”

“You make it sound like Sir Gawaine or something.”

“It is something like. Will you pour the water? My hands…”

Jacob poured the hissing water into the blue-and-white teapot; the infuser rattled against the china. On the dictionary, beside the pot, Kaspar had stacked two cups and two saucers, and Jacob gingerly lifted the dictionary-as-tea-tray, careful to hold the dictionary itself shut. At the western end of his room, Kaspar opened a small door into a stairwell that ran up to a courtyard. The two men took the stairs with baby steps, the teacups clinking, Kaspar panting.

The sun fell on two wooden benches, placed where a pavement of concrete flagstones gave way to a yellowed lawn.

“It was a great trouble to find Rafe,” Kaspar resumed, when they were seated.

Jacob looked in on the brewing tea, which he had set, dictionary and all, on the dry grass between them. “He wasn’t at home? In Havelská?”

“He does not like to have a home, you know.”

“Since Melinda?”

“Since always. It was also difficult because he is more angry with me now.”

“He couldn’t be angry with you.”

“I am to him a disappointment. It is his job, you know, to understand people, and he mistook me. He thought I simply liked to be contrary.”

“His job?”

“Oh, I do not mean to say his job. I do not mean to say more than I can. It is his métier, rather. He does not care to be wrong about a person.”

The sun seemed to be calming Kaspar, as if he were an infant and it were bathing him. He closed his eyes in it and folded his arms, hugging himself in his sweater, which Jacob would have found too warm. He was catching his breath, Jacob noticed; catching it and slowing it down.

Jacob poured the tea. His grip shook as much as Kaspar’s would have, and as he placed Kaspar’s on the bench beside him, the cup loudly shivered in its saucer.

At the sound Kaspar opened his eyes again. “You are here,” he said a little sleepily, as if he had briefly drifted off and wasn’t sure upon returning that he remembered the last few minutes correctly. One ended up wanting to take care of Kaspar despite oneself.

“I am,” Jacob admitted.

“Perhaps it is in talking,” Kaspar said.

“What is?”

“That one is near God.” He smiled as if to apologize for having reintroduced the topic. “In a special kind of talking, perhaps. Perhaps in talking with you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. With you when you are here.”

“Not me.”

“Yes, with the you that is here.”

“You mean a general you.”

“No!” Kaspar seemed alarmed. “Not a general you.”

“I don’t know if I know what you mean.”

“The you that cannot go away.”

“I can always go away,” Jacob said drily.

“Ah, that is so. Maybe it is
that
you, then,” Kaspar said, not at all shy to assert the opposite of the idea that he had just been maintaining. “The one that can go away. You are after all a writer. You are always here and you are always not here. And I think it must also be in writing. In some kinds of writing. Will you come to shul with me?”

“Sure. Where is it?”

“Near the central train station. I will meet you outside the station on Friday, half an hour before sundown. It will make you very happy.”

The windows of Kaspar’s building, blinded by the glance of the sun, looked down on them.

“How is it that you know the word ‘shul,’ Jacob?” Kaspar continued.

“I’m American,” Jacob irritably answered. “It’s crazy of you to be so into Judaism.”

“Is it crazy?” he asked, a little fearfully. He was sometimes aware of the fragility of his own character as well as the humor of it.

“Maybe you’re interested because in Prague Judaism is something lost.”

“Not altogether lost,” Kaspar insisted. “One may be with them.”

“Like the pity you have for Communism now.”

“But it is the same with Christ,” Kaspar objected. “It is only that he was lost that makes him God.”

“Is that orthodox? I thought he was supposed to have been God in the first place.”

“No,” Kaspar disagreed. “It is that he came back. No one usually returns.”

“So it’s the coming back and not the being lost.”

“Well, if you ask, it is the loss, I think. One needn’t believe in the coming back, but it is perhaps necessary for something dear to be lost.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps it is necessary to the making of a story. A story after all is a way of remembering love.”

Jacob thought of the debates of the writing group. “I thought a story was something that trapped you.”

“But that is how. It could not trap you if it were not about love.”

“You said once that sex couldn’t be put into a story.”

“Oh, well, sex.”

“What do you have against sex?”

There was something preposterous about introducing the topic with Kaspar. “Perhaps I have not such a wide acquaintance with it.”

“I’m seeing someone,” Jacob said, a little boldly.

“‘Seeing,’” Kaspar echoed. “Oh yes,” he added, as soon as he remembered this use of the word. “Are you happy?”

“I guess. I’m not going to stay, though.”

“Why not, if you have found him?”

“I only found him because I was leaving. That was the understanding. Also I ruined it a little. I let him think I was a writer.”

“But it is true.”

“No it isn’t.”

“You will not let me say it. Perhaps I am not as beautiful as this man.”

“You aren’t in love with me.”

“You cannot be sure. But in any case it is not that, either, that licenses him.”

“What is it?”

“That you are in love with him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it is you who will know.”

Jacob had taken advantage of Milo. It was sweet to pretend to be a writer, but it was cheating; it was only by leaving that Jacob would have any chance of becoming the sort of figure that he had let Milo fall for. If, after leaving, he found that he couldn’t become that figure, he could at least try to become someone responsible, someone a little more substantial.

“It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” Jacob suggested.

“It is only in countries where the winter is bitter that the spring is capable of this subtlety.”

“Have you ever lived in a country without bitter winters?”

“In books,” Kaspar admitted.

*   *   *

—Are they good? Milo asked. Jacob had chosen a piece of hazelnut sponge cake and a
. They were standing at a plastic counter in the glass-walled pastry shop in
.