Free Necessary Errors: A Novel by Caleb Crain Page A

say, Are you in love Luboš?”
    “In love with.”
    “Ah yes. Then are you
in
love
with
him.” Jacob didn’t answer. “
Ale stydíš se, Kubo
. You are shy.”
    “What about you, Ota?”
    “I? I love you, of course, Kuba, but I am too slow. Luboš has run off with you, like a rabbit. Not rabbit. Like fox.” And he translated for his entourage.
    One of the boys, Milo, a blond with even bangs and a large, Roman nose, changed the subject by asking, in Czech, which state Jacob was from.
    —I live in Texas, Jacob began, pointing a finger over his shoulder, as if the past were literally behind him, because he didn’t know how to form the past tense. —And then in Massachusetts.
    “Stop this,” Ota interrupted, and mocked Jacob’s gesture, which had in fact become a crutch. “Já jsem bydlel,” he instructed. “Já jsem bydlel, ty jseš bydlel, on bydlel.”
    It was easier to speak of the past in Czech than Jacob had expected. —I lived in Texas and then in Massachusetts, he said to Milo, more correctly.
    —Were you a cowboy? Milo asked, with an amusement gentler than Ota’s. He asked as if he hoped Jacob would pretend.
    —No, Jacob said, sorry to disappoint him.
    —That’s too bad, Milo replied, and glanced under the table. —I like those big boots.
    Ota again interrupted: “‘
Ty velké boty,’ prosím, kluku
. Ah, this reminds me. Do you hear?” He pointed at the speakers. “What does it mean, ‘things on your chest’?”
    “A burden, a secret. Like the boy with the fox under his shirt.”
    “And the fox eats the boy in the chest, I remember, and he says nothing. Do you have tape recorder?”
    “No, but I can borrow one from the language school, since I’m the teacher.”
    “Ah, teacher, then will you borrow it? And I will give to you the cassette of my favorite band, Depeche Mode, and you will write all the words of all the songs on a paper, that yes? And you will give to me the paper.”
    He handed Jacob a cassette, which he must have been palming since before Jacob sat down next to him. “Jééé,” commented Milo, admiringly, when he leaned forward and saw that it was a copy of
Violator
, the band’s new album. The group seemed to have an intense following among Prague’s youth; Jacob had seen their name spray-painted on the side of a
panelák
—the first apolitical graffiti he had spotted.
    “You may listen a week, two weeks, a month—as you like it,” Ota added. Listening was to be Jacob’s reward for service. Jacob accepted the commission.
    *   *   *
    On the nights Jacob stayed home and transcribed the lyrics, he felt a homesick pride: gay teenagers around the world learned his mother tongue by memorizing pop songs.
    But then he didn’t see Ota for a little while. The fault lay with Ivan, T-Club’s doorman. For several weeks, after Jacob’s first visit, Ivan had admitted Jacob as soon as Jacob presented himself, but then, mysteriously, he reverted to a policy of making Jacob wait. Did he want a bribe? Jacob had no intention of giving him one; it would have been wrong, and for someone being paid a state salary in crowns, too costly.
    Jacob was now sometimes made to wait ten minutes and sometimes an hour and a half. He and the doorman both understood that there was nowhere else he could go. He tried the city’s one other gay bar, where he danced for a few hours with a group of gypsies, some in half drag, but it was, as the guidebook had warned, rougher; there was little talking, which was what Jacob most wanted; it was much farther away; and he had been made to wait there, too, by a doorman who looked as if hewould hit Jacob if he questioned him about it. Ivan would never hit, Jacob felt certain. Nonetheless, as soon as Jacob appeared at T-Club, he was at Ivan’s mercy.
    He asked Luboš to take him to the movies, and they met at a theater in Malá Strana, the Lesser Town, for a Saturday matinee. An American thriller was playing with Czech subtitles. In the small,