Everyone was so pleased by this news.
It was Sunday. There could be a night off away from those shiny metal glasses and those ice-blue eyes – watching, watching, always watching.
‘Cheers to our good old manager, Pavel,’ Aleš said and he winked at me. He lifted up his glass of wine. ‘Na zdraví.’ Cheers.
A night off – to drink, to share food, to laugh and dance. They were all at our place, filling up the third storey flat – even The Magician.
A feast.
Bottles of beer and bottles of wine – lemonade for me, sweet and fizzy. Chicken schnitzels, fried potato, cucumber salad.
That was my favourite – cucumber salad with cream and vinegar and black pepper, chilled from the fridge so all the cucumber juice got sucked out of the cucumber slices and mixed in with the cream. The salad bowl still had some of the cream left in the bottom and I couldn’t stop staring at it. I wanted to grab the big bowl up in my hands and drink the cream down.
The Magician leaned into me, whispered in my ear. ‘I want to drink the cream, too,’ he said. ‘I love cucumber salad.’
My face felt hot.
And then he stood up, raised a glass to my grandma. The room fell silent.
‘What wonderful food,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Máňa. It’s so nice to feel like we are home. We have all been away for too long.’
Everyone clapped. Everybody drank. Home.
My grandma’s cheeks were red, and maybe it was from all the little drinks that kept being poured and drunk quickly, or from all the laughter, or because there was not one scrap left on anyone’s plate. The food had been devoured.
My grandma was a good cook.
I took all the plates and bowls and cutlery into the small kitchen by myself. I wanted to do it and it took me a long time. There were so many plates and dishes, more than ever before, and I had to stack them up on the kitchen table because they did not all fit on the sink top.
My grandpa came in to get more beer from the fridge. ‘Leave that,’ he said, and he had a spring in his step. ‘We can wash up tomorrow.’
My grandma put a marble cake and biscuits on the dining table and there was only Czech in the room. Shapes and colours like smoke. And sometimes I understood every single word like it was there in my blood, there in my bones, and sometimes I understood nothing at all but laughter and bright eyes.
Alena pushed her chair in next to mine, and she grabbed my hand under the table, squeezed it tight.
‘This flat is so much like my mother’s flat,’ she said. ‘It even smells the same. It’s so strange! I think your grandmother never left home.’
Aleš looked at us from across the table. He did not laugh like everyone else. He drank, he smoked, he stared at Alena but she would not look at him. She just kept on squeezing my hand.
‘Have some biscuits, some cake,’ she said, and when I looked over at my grandma she nodded a happy yes. I took one of the hazelnut crescent biscuits and it crumbled in my mouth – rich and good. More drinking, music playing on the stereo, and my grandma’s face was shiny and full like the moon.
Alena got up from the table and walked out of the room. Aleš followed her with his eyes. He lit a cigarette. I took another biscuit, one of the jam-filled ones with icing sugar on top, and scoffed it down. People were starting to move into the lounge and someone turned the stereo up. A different tape, a different sound. The Rolling Stones – swirling electric.
I want to follow the music, the beat, but I walk down the hall.
Alena.
I see her at the phone table in the dark, her head against the wall.
She sits there, the receiver in her hand, the receiver to her ear.
Not speaking.
Not listening.
The phone is dead – cut off. There is no one on the other side.
Still she holds the receiver.
‘Luděk,’ she says, softly.
I step closer. ‘It’s me,’ I say.
‘It’s you,’ she says, her dark eyes on mine. She reaches for my hand.
‘I want to stay,’ she says, and I blink my eyes – once, twice. ‘But I just can’t.’
She pulls me into her, holds me tightly. I can feel her breath on the top of my head. We stay like that.
The music gets louder.
‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she says.
The door to the lounge opens like an explosion of light, of sound – a beat stomping down.
‘Little Fox! Little Fox!’ Someone yells, and I’m pulled into the room. The dancers surround me, free and wild – spinning, jumping – the bass sliding in-out, in-out. Even my grandma and grandpa are dancing slowly together. Suddenly my grandma lets loose with the beat. She kicks off her shoes and moves in her stockinged feet. Everyone follows and kicks off their shoes, and one shoe nearly hits my grandpa in the face. The room is packed. The room is full of life. Shoes in the corners, furniture pushed to the walls, bare feet dancing. My grandma’s beehive shakes itself loose and her long hair falls. The white streak shines.
I dance with everyone. I even dance with The Magician and he holds my hands and swings me into the air and round and round. I am dizzy with it. I am free. And if the lady downstairs is banging her broomstick on her ceiling in complaint as she likes to do, then no one can hear it. Even when the song fades out in an endless loop, the laughter and panting and clapping drown out the stillness and the ticking clock.
I see Alena on the other side of the room. Aleš stands near and they are talking. Alena keeps shaking her head, her hands by her sides.
A new song starts – slower but still rocking, with a real swing. The dancers around me start to clap along with the sharp claps on the recording. They know this song by heart. They sing along. ‘Under My Thumb’.
Aleš reaches for Alena’s arm, but she pulls away. He reaches again, again, and finally she lets him touch her. He pulls her towards him and she falls into his tall frame. He holds her close like he’s saying, I know. It’s okay. There are no words, just the beat and bodies moving, messages flying like bright ribbons across the room from adult to adult. And I am underneath it all.
I’m spinning, spinning – suddenly so sleepy.
I sit down on the couch and my eyes are heavy, and the smoke haze in the room gets thicker. The music keeps playing but it is muffled now, and Alena kisses me on the cheek, but then she changes shape, she turns into The Magician.
‘I will see you again in a few years. It is not so long. Just a week of dreams,’ he says.
And I wake up in bed with my grandma sleeping beside me. The theatre has gone.
The flat feels too big. The flat feels empty. I can hear my grandpa snoring.
All that is left of the magic is the tape in the cassette player – a tape alive with rock and roll. Alive with the Rolling Stones.
When the telephone rang in the hallway of that third storey flat, it was always someone we knew, or something important – like the bank, or the travel agent or the state electricity commission. The telephone did not ring often, but when it did my grandma would panic. She had no confidence speaking on the phone, and even though it was usually family, sometimes even her sister calling from Prague, my grandma always made my grandpa answer it. She would stand behind him, hover there, while my grandpa picked up the receiver.
‘Hello, William Kopek speaking,’ he would say in an English accent, like a man from the BBC news, and not my grandpa at all. My grandpa could hide all traces of his real accent when he wanted to.
‘Who is it?’ My grandma would ask, her ear as close to the receiver as she could get it. My grandpa would wave her off.
‘Yes, I understand. I believe that account has been paid. Thank you for the call.’
My grandpa would hang up the phone, stand and rub his forehead.
The bills lived in a pile on the dining table. We only used the dining table on special occasions, and my grandpa would write letters, do the crossword, or pay the bills sitting at the dining table. Bills
would always be paid at the very last minute. My grandpa would write a cheque on the due date, and not before. He figured it was better to get the tiny amount of interest on his savings than give these companies the chance to do the same and make more money.
My grandpa had very good handwriting. He said it was because of his job, that technical drawing taught you precise lettering. His writing was very clear and ordered – with every capital letter coming out the exact same height and width. But he could also write in a beautiful curly copperplate when he wanted to, and he would always write like that on Christmas cards, and birthday cards, and letters. He said that kind of writing came from a long time ago, from school, only it was not in English but in Czech, so he had to practise it with English for many years.
Dear Little Fox,
Merry Christmas
Bless your little head, Bill x
If my grandpa wasn’t home, my grandma dreaded the telephone ringing. The sound of it would make her jump, and she would stand in the hall, frozen still.
Sometimes she wouldn’t answer it at all. We would just stand there together and the phone would ring and ring, and it felt like it would never end.
But sometimes she would reach out, pick up the heavy green receiver.
‘Hello?’ A question. Her soft, quiet voice.
Relief. Her eyes smiling. An explosion of Czech, fast and running altogether. It was her sister, her son, a friend. It was okay.
I’m marching. I’m a soldier marching off to war. The 1812 Overture.
I turn, stride back along the lounge room as the music gets loud and excited with brass and crashing.
I look at my grandpa sitting in his armchair. ‘Were you a soldier?’ I ask.
The music softens, and the swirling strings begin.
My grandpa never talked about the war. But it was there in the way he walked, in the way he sometimes could not sleep.
‘I wanted to fight,’ he said, and he filled his pipe, lit it carefully and puffed in quick succession – puff-puff-puff. I could see the tobacco burn orange as my grandpa inhaled.
‘I wanted to fight, but I had to stay.’
At first, he could only get a job on the factory floor working with watches and clocks. Then someone realised he had trained as a toolmaker, and that he was very good at this. Soon he was head toolmaker. Soon he had his own team.
Suddenly, even though he was a foreigner, he got to work on very exciting things. Important things to do with aeroplanes. Important things to do with winning the war.
‘We had to fight from the Smiths Factory and from Hendon Aerodrome,’ he said, and he blinked then, my grandpa – maybe thinking of the factory, or about aeroplane controls, about London, a place he spent thirty-two years of his life living and working and raising a family.
He puffed on his pipe.
‘That’s when I started to smoke a pipe,’ he said. And he took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand. He nodded his head.
‘At Smiths, everyone was always asking, Hey, Billy, give us a cigarette. Cheeky sods.’ He puffed again.
‘So I gave up the cigarettes. I started to smoke a pipe.’
He was smiling now. ‘No one ever asked if they could have a puff.’
I sat on my stool, the big one, and kicked my legs out. I wanted to play cards but we would not play until my grandpa had finished his pipe.
The overture was getting loud again and soon the cannons would come.
‘We lived right near Hendon Aerodrome,’ my grandpa said, ‘so I could walk to work. And I could even go home for a hot lunch. That was good. I liked to do that, and it was a nice flat. We made the best of it even with all the bombs. We tried to make it a home. But then someone decided that foreigners couldn’t live near Hendon Aerodrome. Maybe they thought your grandma was a spy.’
My grandpa paused then, looked into the distance.
‘But guess what?’
I shrugged. I could not guess.
‘The flat they moved us to was only eight hundred metres away from the one we had.’
My grandpa let out a single laugh then. ‘Ha! Did they think a spy could not walk the extra eight hundred metres to the aerodrome?’
He puffed on his pipe, but it was out of tobacco. It was burnt out. He tapped the black contents into the ashtray and put his pipe down on the ceramic plate holder next to his chair.
My grandpa looked at me then, right in my eyes.
‘Lots of rules are pointless,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to follow everything. Make your own mind up about what is right.’
I nodded. I picked up the pack of cards as the church bells rang and tumbled and the cannons fired in victory.
Vilém
SEPTEMBER 1942
The shelter is crowded. Maybe it’s another false alarm, but the air raid siren just keeps on screaming. It won’t rest.
‘It’s okay,’ he says softly to Máňa. He speaks in English.
There are a few men in the shelter who he works with. Neighbours. He recognises them in the yellow glow of torchlight. They only speak to him at work. In the street, they might make eye contact and sometimes they even nod, but that is it. There is never a smile, never a polite question asked about the day, about the weather, about family. No questions. No handshake. He is not one of them.
But he understands. He has heard it all so many times before.
‘He’s all right I suppose, but that one, that Marie or whatever she calls herself – hardly any bloody English for a start. I don’t care what they keep saying about Czechoslovakia. They could be Germans for all we know.’
He can feel Máňa shiver now and he holds her tighter. It terrifies him to think that he might not have met her, that he might have missed it. This one good thing in his life.
At home, alone in their flat, they are happy. Work is fine and Máňa is relieved they finally have their own place. But she must practise more English.
She tries. She listens to the radio all day and she understands every single word that is said. But her accent – it is stubborn. It does not want to leave. Maybe she can’t let it go because it is the one thing she still has from home. The one thing that totally belongs to her.
There is crying from somewhere in the shadows. A woman crying. Everyone is waiting for the big explosion that will blow up Hendon Aerodrome. Everyone is waiting in this shelter to die.
He touches Máňa’s face, runs his fingers along one cheekbone. He loves her face – her strong face. They talk about her face, the women in the street. About how it is so different. So foreign. So strange.
Sometimes he wants to yell out that they have boring, flat faces that no one will ever remember or stare at or even notice at all. But he never yells out anything. He keeps quiet. He is polite. He gets on with his work and is grateful for that.
Anyway, none of these people matter now because they have to move again. All foreigners are to be moved away from Hendon Aerodrome. A year ago, they were moved so he could be close to Hendon Aerodrome and the factory.
He does not know where they will live now, he only knows they have to pack and be ready. More neighbours that will hate them, hate their height and their cheekbones and their names and their accents.
Máňa must work on her accent. She looks up at him.
Vilém, she mouths silently.
Nobody knows his real name.
He had practised this new one, saying it over and over, Wwwilliam. Wwwilliam. He had concentrated on the strange sound of W, witnessed how it made his mouth move in the bathroom mirror. Wwwilliam.
He couldn’t be Vilém anymore. He had to leave Vilém behind. And maybe the shadow of Vilém was still there, lying in the bed by the window high on the third floor, above the narrow, cobbled street, listening to his little brother sleep through the night.
But he may as well not have practised his Ws at all, because on his first day of work everyone just called him Bill.
Bill, Billy, Billy-Boy. Tall old Bill. Sometimes Will – but never William,
and never, ever Vilém.
He must be Bill.
The sirens fade. The all clear rings out at long last. He takes a long breath.
The only way to live now is to keep moving and not look back. It is the only way his heart can keep on beating and not break. He must look forward – and never behind.
He must never look behind.
Prague
1980
Luděk had tried to find Atlas. He’d spent a whole month of Saturdays trying, but it was no use. He didn’t even know who to ask. He could not ask Babi because then she would know he was running around town, instead of playing at the park like she thought – playing with the other kids in the street. But he hated their games. The other kids were all so boring. Maybe Atlas was made up? Maybe the statue didn’t even exist, because he had looked everywhere – in all the little gardens he knew, in all the public squares around. Nothing.
He walked into the kitchen. Babi was reading her magazine and smoking a cigarette. On the cover were three women doing some kind of exercise routine. They were all blonde. It was always the same story, the same kind of picture. It was always sunny on the cover of Květy magazine.
Why couldn’t he just forget Atlas? Why couldn’t he just think about something else?
‘Babi? he said. ‘Old Lady Bla … Mrs Bláža asked me if I can go over and help her this afternoon.’
Babi raised one eyebrow. She put her open magazine down on the table and studied Luděk’s face.
‘Help with what?’ she said.
Luděk moved his eyes away from hers. He stared at the upside-down magazine print. Blah blah blah blah – that’s what the words may as well have said.
There Was Still Love Page 6