Necessary Errors: A Novel by Caleb Crain Read Free Book Online Page B

out the word for message.
    Luboš shook his head. —The man, with whom I spoke, wasn’t so polite. He said, that it’s not your phone.
    Jacob wanted to say that the Stehlíks had assured him that he was free to use the phone whenever he wanted, but he couldn’t figure out how to say it; his sentence broke down.
    —Did you want to see me? Luboš asked. He seemed to be playing on Jacob’s anxiety, which must have been evident in his face.
    —Yes, yes. He wanted to say that he liked Luboš, but it required some concentration, because in the transition from English grammar to Czech, the subject and object of the sentence switched places: —You are pleasing to me.
    The words sounded childlike.
    —And French is not pleasing to you, Jacob continued, changing the subject to one suggested by his dictionary.
    Luboš seemed to want to take this up but hesitated. Instead, more in pantomime than in words, he suggested they order a plate of, which Jacob knew to be small, stale slices of bread spread with lard and topped with diced vegetables and meats. It was already too late to find a table open at a proper restaurant, where, still governed by socialist principles, most waiters turned away guests who arrived after the first seating.
    It seemed grand to Jacob that he was sitting in a café in Prague withhis Czech lover, forgoing dinner for the sake of whatever it was that was between them. He could smoke a few cigarettes to kill his hunger, if thedidn’t accomplish that.
    “Or we can buy
párky
later,” Jacob said, in English, thinking out loud. A
párek
was a fat roasted pink sausage, sold on the streets at all hours.
    —And
párky
are pleasing to you, Kuba?
    Jacob was happy to play the straight man. —A great deal, he said.
    Upon the arrival of the waiter, Luboš asked him only to refill their drinks.
    *   *   *
    Jacob had arrived in Prague with a project. He couldn’t see that he was carrying it; to see that would have required standing a little farther outside himself than he was able to. He would have said it was a mood, if anyone had asked, or maybe a spirit, if he was writing in the privacy of his journal. But he wouldn’t have understood that it took the shape of a story he wanted to live out. It was a common enough project for an earnest, idealistic young person who was comfortable with only one pleasure, reading, and who had graduated from college in the year of the protest in Tiananmen Square, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution, so that his first personal experience of adult freedom—which he knew didn’t count for much in the grand scheme of things but which he felt with great intensity—seemed echoed by the wider world. Although he knew that he was hearing not echoes but emanations from distant sources, he wasn’t above thinking they might have a special resonance for him—that he might be receptive to them in a way others couldn’t be. He had a sense that everything in his life up to that point was prelude, which might safely be skipped by anyone who came late to the story, and the recent date of his discovery that he loved men strengthened this feeling; he thought that nothing finally attached him to the world that had formed him, and that this separation was what he had instead of a skill or a legacy; this was his special advantage. Without knowing it, he was looking for people who were heroic, so he could join them. It had to be without knowing it that he set out on this quest, because he did know that it was too late. Try as he might to acquire a memory of the revolution, he would find only souvenirs. He was on guard, paradoxically, against many of the same sentiments that drewhim; nostalgia would be a kind of infidelity to the change whose essence he was trying to come close to. To break through the commemorative trinkets and partygoer’s clichés, it was vital that he learn Czech, from a Czech lover if possible. Even if it was too late to take part in the great change