Necessary Errors: A Novel by Crain Caleb

Author:Crain, Caleb [Crain, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101613658
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Very much.”

She brought him a plate, still steaming, of thick beef stew, which paprika had turned burnt sienna, accompanied by small, whitish-yellow potatoes as clean and polished as bird’s eggs. It was twice as much food as he would have been served in a restaurant. The children waited politely. In the tall, broad windows behind them, the day was dying. A black, ropey mantle was being unrolled and lowered, and it was lit from below, as it descended, by a faint pink wash cast by the sun. If asked about the view, Jacob would have denied that it meant anything, but it’s difficult to take a thing like the sky ironically.

He pushed away his plate and made an effort. He lay the postcards face down in the middle of the table and had the children draw them one at a time, like cards from a deck, and challenge one another with the images. “Who is it?” They recognized Mickey Mouse and Albert Einstein, but Marilyn Monroe was mistaken for Madonna, and the children drew a blank on many of the faces, even when Jacob supplied the names. Jacob had to explain, and the point of the exercise was soon lost in pidgin storytelling.

Sooner than he had planned to, Jacob moved on to his second idea. He took a bag of rice and a single winter glove from his bag.

—You’re still hungry? Prokop said.

“Wise guy,” Jacob replied.

“Wh—, wh—,” Prokop tried to mimic the words.

“Moudrý chlap,” Jacob translated. “‘Wise guy.’” Now they all repeated the phrase.

Jacob set the bag of rice before Prokop and the glove before Ladislav. Then he took off his wristwatch and set it before Anežka. “Jééé,” Prokop exclaimed of the watch, enviously, and Anežka, pleased that it was hers for the moment, wriggled into a kneeling position in her chair.

“What’s that?” Jacob asked Prokop, pointing at the rice.

Prokop didn’t know the word. “How do you say rýže,” he asked out of the side of his mouth, with pretend furtiveness.

“Reese,” his mother supplied.

“Rice,” Jacob corrected.

“It is a rice,” Prokop answered.

“‘It’s rice,’” Jacob again corrected.

“It’s rice.”

“How much is it?”

“H—, h—.”

“How much?”

“How much,” Prokop succeeded in repeating.

Jacob took a large white-metal coin out of his pocket. “How much is it? Is it five crowns?”

“Is five crowns,” Prokop agreed, as he saw the meaning of the question.

“‘It’s five crowns.’”

“No, is ten crowns,” Prokop revised.

“‘It’s ten crowns.’”

“It’s ten crowns,” Prokop said at last.

“I’ll take it,” Jacob told him, and substituted for the rice a honey-colored ten-crown note, withdrawn from his wallet, from which stared a mustachioed man in an Inverness cape and a polka-dot cravat. A detective or a magician. “Thank you!”

“You are welcome.”

“No, in America, you say, ‘Thank you,’ too.”

—Truly?

“Yes, because I’m giving you money.” Jacob pointed so that the meaning of his words would be clear.

“Thank you!” Prokop said. Then he repeated, as if for the mere pleasure of saying it: “How much!”

“Now you buy Ladislav’s glove. Ask him what it is, first.”

Ladislav stumbled, predictably, in omitting the indefinite article before “glove.

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