Fran had never thought of herself as being free. She saw herself as being alone, lonely, unattached and single. All she wanted was to be coupled. But now she thought about the value of being physically free. Free from persecution. Free to think whatever she wanted and go wherever she wanted and speak her mind. It was a good starting point. If she could view her life from a different angle, as someone free from constraints, perhaps she could find a way to embrace that freedom? Rose was right, this was the best chance each of them had to experience a seismic shift. It wasn’t going to happen in their daily lives but it could happen on this strange, magical journey. She was torn between being excited by the possibilities and, at the same time, terrified of them.
They took a taxi over to the famous department store KaDeWe, on Tauentzienstraße, for lunch in the sixth-floor food hall. The palatial extravagance of the displays of cheeses and saus ages, salads, roasts of meat, platters of lobsters and oysters, piles of exotic fruits and pyramids of chocolates and patisserie were overwhelming. It was hard to know where to start.
Unfazed, Rose led the charge, piling her plate high. Fran took a more cautious approach but she noticed that Maggie, normally enthusiastic about food, was tentative and indecisive. Her plate was still empty while Fran and Rose had paid and were sitting down to eat.
Sensing something was not right, Fran got up from the table and offered to make a selection for her. Maggie handed over her plate with a sigh of relief. ‘Just not too much,’ she said. ‘I’m not all that hungry.’
On their last night in Berlin, Rose put forward the idea that they should go out to a club. Fran and Maggie both flatly refused to even consider it.
‘You’re a couple of pikers,’ Rose railed. ‘Come on. Frannie? Just for an hour.’
Fran shook her head. ‘I hated clubs even when I was young.’
‘That’s when people smoked. It’ll be cool and edgy. You like that. Come on, guys. We’re in Berlin.’
‘You know when baby boomers go to cool places, it automatically makes them uncool,’ argued Maggie. ‘Just by entering a club, we’ll tarnish its reputation.’
‘Oh, what a load of crap,’ said Rose. It took a while, but eventually she accepted that neither of them could be convinced. She put on her jacket and left in a huff.
‘Perhaps I should go to keep an eye on her,’ suggested Fran with some reluctance.
Maggie shrugged. ‘It’s up to you. She is a grown woman.’
Unconvinced, Fran grabbed her bag and jacket and hurried after Rose. She took the stairs and, as she reached the first-floor landing, saw Rose exit the lift into the lobby and walk into the hostel bar. Fran hovered unseen outside the door and watched Rose order a beer and take it to a table looking over the street.
‘Lose her already?’ asked Maggie, looking up from her book in surprise when Fran arrived back in the room a few minutes later.
Fran smiled. ‘She’s having a beer at the downstairs bar.’
Maggie laughed. ‘Did she see you?’
Fran shook her head. ‘I feel bad for not going with her but I’m more relieved not to have to go.’
‘Oh, Fran. You don’t have to do everything Rose wants, you know.’
‘I know. Don’t tell her I saw her, though. Let’s just go along with it.’
Fran didn’t hear Rose come in but, next day, couldn’t resist asking how it went.
‘What happens in Berlin stays in Berlin,’ said Rose haughtily and changed the subject.
Chapter Eleven
After the long walk from the station, their suitcases bumping over the cobblestones, followed by having to haul their bags up three flights of stairs, Maggie was very relieved to arrive in their Prague accommodation. Rose had surpassed herself with this booking. On the outskirts of Old Town, it was a spacious three-bedroom flat with high ceilings and double doors between rooms. Maggie opened up the tall casement windows and looked down into the central garden between the adjoining buildings. It was dominated by a pair of huge old beech trees, bright green with new leaves, and populated by a flock of birds with an odd cry, like a trolley with squeaky wheels. Turning from the window, she realised that Rose was waiting eagerly for her approval.
‘It’s wonderful, Rose,’ said Maggie with a smile. ‘And so quiet too. Well done.’
Fran agreed and Rose was visibly relieved. Maggie felt guilty and promised herself again that she would curb her complaints, for her own sake as well as theirs.
They decided to rest in their rooms for an hour before they headed out to explore the city.
Maggie lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. Being catapulted from one city to the next was disorienting. Strangely, she had lost any desire to stop, becoming possessed by the urge to keep moving. She had a sense of anticipation for the next place, as though she was searching for somewhere she would feel comfortable and content.
She’d had her phone on silent overnight and deliberately not looked at it. Now she scrolled through the messages, each revealing a new episode in the Dimitratos soap opera. The family had restrained themselves for the first few days after she left but that was now over and every day there was some new tangle to be unravelled. Messaging was such a tedious and laborious way to communicate too, rife with confusion. Yannis was off work sick and Kristo was asking Maggie to check if particular payments had been made. Elena had sent a list of complaints about Yia-yiá’s interference in the twins’ lives – as if Maggie had any control over that. There was a missed call from the home phone that was most likely Yia-yiá. She was the only one who used it these days. Another missed call from Nico. She needed to manage him somehow until she got her strength back. Then something had to be done. She didn’t want to think about that.
She put her phone aside and tried to focus on being here in Prague, a city she had found mysterious and fascinating on that first visit forty years ago. No doubt she would have to endure more history lessons from Rose today. Rose was becoming as bad as Peter. You couldn’t offer any opinion on politics or current affairs without Peter making you feel like a goose for your superficial understanding of the world. They were both very knowledgeable and it didn’t normally bother Maggie. Perhaps it was less to do with Rose and more that Maggie was off balance at the moment.
But something else had changed. She had completely lost her appetite. It happened in a single moment as she had stood gazing over that smorgasbord in KaDeWe. She had known for months that she ate without noticing or tasting her food, attempting to fill a void, to find some comfort and feel solid within herself. Nothing seemed to satisfy her. Sometimes she would forget what she’d just eaten, no memory of texture or flavour remained. And, much as she resented Rose’s accusations, alcohol was the same. It had become impossible to relax without the help of a glass of wine or a vodka, even though it sometimes had the opposite effect, making her tense and anxious. She longed to escape her own skin, even for an hour or two, to shake off the agitation that possessed her. But, in that moment, she had realised that no amount of food would make her feel better. She knew that she needed to make a conscious effort to recalibrate, slow down and try to recapture the pleasure food offered. She didn’t feel hungry any more but she felt empty, as though making space for some new connection between belly and brain.
In the late afternoon, they went out into the streets of Old Town Prague. The day was bright but cool. Summer came slow and late to Eastern Europe. The square, with its famous astronomical clock and ornate medieval buildings, was completely packed with other tourists. There was a market selling souvenirs and food. The air smelt of warm cinnamon sugar from the many stalls offering trdelník: a sweet pastry tube cooked on long poles over hot embers and filled with chocolate or whipped cream. None of them remembered this confection at all from the previous visit. Some of the stalls sold a dish they did remember: a traditional potato, bacon and cabbage dish called halušky. They bought a bowl to share and perched on a bench to watch the crowds. Rose took one spoonful and pulled a face. ‘Ugh, it tastes like burn
t wallpaper glue.’
Fran tried a few mouthfuls. ‘I don’t mind it. Smoked bacon is quite strong if you’re not used to it.’
‘I don’t remember the food as being that great,’ said Maggie.
‘It was under Soviet rule back then,’ said Fran. ‘I’m sure it has improved. Anyway, this is tourist food, not the best example.’
‘I can’t believe how many people are here,’ said Rose. ‘It is a weekend, I suppose. But still.’
On cue, a mob of British lads ran amok in the crowd waving bottles of beer and singing football chants.
‘It’s cheap flights. You can fly here from the UK for twenty quid,’ explained Fran.
Nearby, a dozen or so Italians gathered around a busker with a piano accordion and swayed together as they sang along to ‘O Sole Mio’ at full volume.
‘This part is like any tourist trap. Locals would never set foot here,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s just a shock after it being so quiet when we were here last.’
As they wandered down Karlova Street towards the river, Maggie remembered Prague as a fairytale city populated by unhappy, disheartened citizens, who had stared at them in the streets and ignored them in shops. Shops that had almost nothing to buy; clothes twenty years out of date and food that wasn’t far behind. Crossing the border into what was then Czechoslovakia, they’d had to exchange funds into koruna but found nothing to spend it on. Now it was the opposite extreme – the streets lined with souvenir and designer clothes shops.
The famous Charles Bridge, guarded by Gothic statues of saints, spanned the Vltava River connecting Old Town with Lesser Town. Today, there were so many tourists on the bridge, it looked as though there was an exodus taking place. The crowd moved as one body across the pedestrian bridge to the other side, only to turn around and walk back.
They decided it was madness to enter that fray and wandered back to the flat along the quieter back streets to avoid the crush. Rose reminded them about the time they were robbed at the camping ground outside Prague. It had been raining and they had all slept in the van. To make more room, they had packed the tent, camp stretcher and all their food underneath the van. In the morning everything had gone. Rose had insisted the police be called and managed to find an English speaker to interpret. The policeman, who took several hours to arrive, gazed into the distance while the interpreter explained the situation, then he yawned, shrugged, got in his Škoda and left.
‘He didn’t even ask for a statement, or a list of missing items,’ remembered Rose.
‘I expect he sent it straight through to Interpol,’ said Maggie. ‘Too big for the local constabulary to handle. I don’t know why you even got the police involved.’
‘Bloody annoying, losing our tent like that,’ insisted Rose.
‘I felt sorry for people having to steal food from us,’ said Fran.
Then, as now, Rose had been indignant about the injustice. As far as Maggie and Fran were concerned, it could have been much worse. They could have had the van stolen. Or someone break in while they were in there.
Fran turned to Rose. ‘Remember that girl, the one who acted as our interpreter, wanted to buy your jeans?’
Rose laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. A filthy pair of Levi’s. I could have been arrested for jeans trafficking.’
‘So funny to think of people buying jeans on the black market. Or smuggling them into the country.’ Fran shook her head in disbelief. ‘What was that all about?’
‘Seems pretty tame compared to what gets smuggled now,’ said Maggie.
‘They were a symbol of freedom …’ began Rose, in the lofty tone that Maggie found so annoying.
Maggie sighed. ‘Rose, we were there. We all know about it. No need for a lecture.’ She turned around in time to see Rose pull a scowling face at Fran. ‘I saw that, Rose!’
Rose laughed. She linked arms with Maggie and Fran and they walked along the quiet cobbled laneways together, not quite the laughing girls but at least in step for the moment.
Maggie woke at dawn the next day, dressed quickly and slipped out of the apartment and into the empty streets. Without crowds cluttering the place up, Prague was the fairytale city of old. Every old building was decorated with some mysterious symbol or detail: gargoyles, angels, saints, gold stars and embellishments of flowers. Coded messages from the past to the present, and she wished she had more time to research and interpret them.
She walked through the archway of the tower and onto the Charles Bridge, delighted to find it was empty. A swathe of grey cloud stretched across the pale blue sky like a veil. A flock of birds swooped overhead, turning and spinning along the river, dappled with dawn light. Under her feet, the cobblestones were smooth and burnished by time and she had a sense of finally beginning her journey.
To her left, a weir crossed the river, the water caught in a long seam that continued, smooth as glass, towards another arched bridge. Up the hill on the far side of the bridge were typical Czech-style buildings painted in cream, sienna and terracotta with red roofs, their domes and towers thrown into sharp relief, silhouetted by the sun rising behind them.
She crossed the bridge and walked on up the hill, pausing occasionally to admire the Gothic, baroque and renaissance architecture all around her. As she continued to wander along the winding lanes, molten gold sunlight poured down through the archways towards her. She reached the summit and looked back over the city with its dark domes and sleepy river and saw how beautiful and unchanged it was; much as it had been forty years ago and for centuries before that. A city that had survived so much conflict and hardship, and yet remained as beautiful as ever.
She came to a large square and sat on some steps at the foot of a statue. She looked around her at the old palace and each of the buildings surrounding the square. Years ago, she would have been reading up in her guidebook about the history of these buildings. Now she just wanted to sit with it. As a child, and even later, she would have wanted to draw the buildings as a way of seeing the detail in them. She had once cherished the idea of becoming an architect. It would have been her first choice, ahead of accountancy, which was her father’s choice. He didn’t believe women were suited to technical careers.
‘Architecture is nothing to do with drawing,’ he had explained. ‘It’s engineering. Mathematics. Technical.’ She got the idea that it was considered unfeminine. Ironic that she ended up in the construction industry. She had often wondered how she would go as a project manager. The design and building of the house at Bayview had been one of the great pleasures and accomplishments of her life. She had done the original sketches, worked with the architect and supervised the build. She loved every minute of it. Loved seeing it grow and develop, dealing with the trades, solving the problems and watching it all come together. The house was too big for them now, but it would take a lot for her to give it up.
As she walked back down the hill towards the bridge, she felt her spirits lift with a sense of the world opening itself up to her, as it had on that first trip when she’d felt a curiosity and openness. She was annoyed with herself that she put so much energy into finding fault in everything. Over the past few years, she had succumbed to the idea that nothing was as good as it once was, even though she knew that older people only clung stubbornly to this belief because they had forgotten the bad old times.
She stood on the bridge and watched the light on the river. She dug around in her handbag and found a bar of chocolate, broke off a piece and put it in her mouth. She let it sit on her tongue as she watched the city slowly wake up: locals walked briskly to work, a man wandered along with his dog, a couple of school children with violin cases passed her. As the chocolate melted in her mouth, layers of flavour and richness tantalised every tastebud. The light and the sweetness brought a moment of contentment.
She pondered the idea that from the outside she looked like a woman with everything: beautiful daughters, an ambitious husband, an enviable home … someone who could buy anything she wanted. What was wrong wit
h her, that it wasn’t enough?
It felt as though she was on the verge of finding some clarity, when her phone began to vibrate in her bag. It was Kristo and she took the call.
‘What are you up to?’ he asked, as though checking up on her.
‘Just standing on a bridge, looking over the Vltava River and thinking about —’
‘I wish I was standing on a bridge looking at a river instead of drowning in fucking problems.’
Maggie was silent. She felt guilty for not wanting to hear what he had to say.
‘Bloody Yannis,’ said Kristo. ‘You’re not going to believe —’
‘Kristo, please, I don’t want to hear about this. I can’t —’
‘How does it hurt for you to listen? You’re not interested any more? Is that it? Everything is now on my head. You’re wandering around looking at rivers while I’m stuck here sorting out everything.’
‘Okay, what’s happened?’ she asked, reluctantly.
‘He’s only bloody mortgaged Auntie Agnes’s house. She didn’t know a thing about it. The bank’s been sending her letters – of course she gave them to Yannis to read and he told her it was nothing.’
‘What’s he done with the money?’ asked Maggie in dismay.
‘He says he’s been scammed online. I don’t know anything about scamming. Can we get the money back, do you think?’
Maggie sighed. ‘I doubt it. We’ll look into it when I get back.’
‘And don’t suggest we fire Yannis because then they’d have no income at all. Shit!’
‘Can you go and see the bank about the mortgage?’
Sixty Summers Page 16