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

Prague for a few days, what should he see? I don’t know, I tell him. The bridge, the castle.”
    “Sounds innocuous.”
    “But he becomes very inquisitive when he hears that I teach here. Asks how much am I paid. Is that polite in America? He starts naming figures, in dollars. I explain that my salary is set by Czech law and that it’s in crowns. And he points to my chocolate cake and says, ‘Can you afford that?’”
    “Was he joking?”
    “I don’t think so. I ask what he does for a living, and I believe the word he used was ‘I-banker.’ ‘Can you afford
that
?’ I say. And he gets quite hot under the collar. Tells me he came to Czechoslovakia to get away from that kind of ‘self-hatred,’ that was his word. He wanted to visit a place where they welcomed free enterprise and were grateful for it. I said, I work for the state and wouldn’t know anything about that. And he becomes quite threatening, with this booming voice—you’re too refined to boom, Jacob, but I find that Americans often have a talent for it—‘
You will.’
And he stalks off like a little tin soldier.”
    “He’s cute, though,” Jacob observed.
    “He isn’t. He’s nondescript, really.”
    “I think he knows we’re talking about him.”
    “Does he? It’s of no concern to me.”
    Jacob was out of things to read in English, and Annie had offered to show him a lending library that the British, during the Communist era, had set up in a corner of the Clementinum, a former Jesuit compound that now belonged to Charles University. To hide from the wind, they took a back route, down an alley that felt like a tunnel, past a Renaissance church with boarded-up windows, crumbling in on itself like an abandoned tenement in a slum, past a wine bar they all liked, and then, beside a store selling accordions and flutes, which seemed never to be open, through a passageway and into a further maze of alleys.
    “I had a date on Thursday,” Jacob volunteered, when they were close to a wall and safe from the wind.
    “Did you.”
    This hardly signaled that she wanted to hear more, but Jacob wanted to try to put the experience into words. He told her about going to Café Slavia. She knew and liked the café, she said; she liked all cafés, really. He was less successful at conveying the tender awkwardness he had felt when alone with Luboš. Moreover, when he related Luboš’s joke, she looked alarmed.
    “That’s peculiar,” she said.
    He found that he wanted to defend Luboš. “I think the Czechs have a darker sense of humor.” Maybe the dictatorship they had been living under had accustomed them to playing with a larger part of the self as if it were false.
    “It’s possible,” she said, mildly.
    The British library was up a flight of stairs in the northeast corner of one of the Clementinum courtyards. Inside, it looked like a library that a New England prep school might have built for itself in the 1970s—comfortable chairs of artificial leather, a beech-wood card catalog, and, along the walls, like carefully trimmed rosebushes, a hedge of waist-high bookshelves, a branch of which jutted into the room every few yards, like the tongue of a capital E.
    They browsed independently. Annie found a novel that her mother had recommended, by Elizabeth Bowen, and Jacob picked out a littleblue Oxford World’s Classic of a Renaissance travel narrative, by an Englishman who claimed to have visited the land of Prester John on his way back from China.
    “Because we’re at the edge of the world?” Annie asked in a whisper, as they compared their choices at a table in the back of the room.
    “I guess.” In fact the library’s schoolroom look had made him feel guilty, and he had chosen the book in a spirit of self-improvement. Over the next two weeks, even though he would find little in it that interested him, beyond a few outlandishly fictional cannibals, he would dutifully read all the way to the end. He wasn’t, after all, writing