by John Lawton
“We just got this from England.”
“Got what?”
“Patience, Nell—it’s time Prague heard this. Time we all heard it.”
“It’s half past ten. People will be trying to sleep.”
“Well—we won’t let them.”
And the music blared out loudly, just shy of distortion—and Nell learnt that it had been twenty years ago today that Sergeant Pepper had taught his band to play.
§132
They only stopped when a neighbour stood in the street, shaking his fist and threatening to call the police. But then, she thought, that was most certainly the reaction they had wanted.
Nell left.
Jiří came running after her.
“Leave me alone, Jiří.”
“Are you … offended?”
“That would not be the word. But I have a word for you—hooligan.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be.”
“In a world where order changes constantly whilst declaring it has stayed the same—to be a hooligan is the only sane behaviour.”
It sounded to Nell like a well-rehearsed line. A position statement.
“Really? Does that mean anything? Does your group of stoned teenagers mean anything, stand for anything?”
“Does Writers ’62 stand for anything? They make statements. They write manifestoes. Statement this, manifesto that … boring.”
Ah, the cardinal sin in the eyes of the young.
“You’re rather scathing. I’ve read some of them—”
“Manifesto shmanifesto … revolution by numbers.”
“What’s your alternative? What do you and your friends do that Writers ’62 does not?”
“We rock. We make revolution for fun. We make revolution for the hell of it—and that’s a quotation from Abbie Hoffmann.”
“Who?”
§133
December 8th
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit
—Brezhnev is here. Utterly without notice. No idea what it means. It could be support for Novotny. Could be the chop. The real threat to the old order is still Dubček.
And … for what it’s worth there is the shadow of a rumour, I put it no more strongly than that, of an abortive military coup. I don’t have any details.
§134
January 5, 1968
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit
—Novotny’s resigned! Cue Martha and the Vandellas. There’ll be dancing in the streets. Still prez, but Dubček takes over as First Secretary. Watch this space.
White Rabbit to Pussy-in-the-Well
—Omelette is asking “What’s a Vandella? Should we open a file?”
§135
January 6th
Nell never seemed to know quite what determined where they spent the night. Petr was hard to part from his books and his study. She liked to wake up, especially at the weekend, with the morning sun streaming into her bedroom from across the river. One coffee at home, a second in the Café Savoy just across the square. If Petr spent all night at Barrandov, then she would always sleep at Malostranské nábřeži.
Last night Petr had fallen asleep at his desk. Nell had draped a blanket over him and gone back to the bedroom.
At eight in the morning she was ready for work—a short, productive Saturday morning with no distractions. She’d deal with all the Bonn correspondence and be back before noon. Then they’d wrap up against January and go out for lunch. The afternoon would be hers, hers and his. They might even go back to bed. An idea that, six months ago, would have struck Nell as the height of decadence.
She was making coffee for both of them.
A tapping at the door, a tapping without the heart of a knock to it.
Jiří was slumped against the door frame, bags under his young eyes, his Beatle-ish hair looking like a bird’s nest.
“What’s happened? You look awful. You look … pathetic.”
“I feel pathetic. Mami threw me out last night.”
He pointed to the suitcase at his feet.
“I slept on a bench in Kampa. When I woke up at seven, this was next to the bench. A message that’s impossible not to get. God knows how she found me.”
Nell reached down a third cup from the shelf. Jiří all but fell into the sofa.
“Why didn’t you come here?”
“It was past midnight. I couldn’t do that to you … or rather I couldn’t do that to Petr and expect to get away with it.”
“Why did Magda do this?”
Jiří said nothing.
“Try telling me the truth.”
“We celebrated last night. Y’know … Novotny gone … the best Friday night ever … we did rather a lot of dope. As a rule I’d change my shirt and suck on a packet of mints—if there was time I’d even give my hair a rinse—before showing up at home. I was too stoned to think straight. And I suppose I thought she’d be in bed. She wasn’t. The scene could not have been more clichéd if she’d been standing there in her nightdress clutching the rolling pin. She smelt dope on me … and that was it. Out. She hates illegality.”
A voice from the next room.
“Can you blame her?”
Petr stood in the study doorway. Nell wondered if Jiří had just lit the blue touch paper.
“After what she went through?”
“I know what Mami went through, Petr.”
“No, you don’t. You know only what she’s told you.”
“Petr, right now I don’t need a lecture. I need somewhere to stay.”
Against Nell’s expectations, Petr sat down next to Jiří—seemingly quite calm.
“That’s a lot to ask.”
Nell gave them each a cup of coffee.
Jiří sipped and sighed.
“I know. All the same I ask.”
Petr gulped his coffee and held the cup out for more.
With her back to them, pouring coffee, Nell said, “There’s my apartment.”
She turned to see their reaction.
Petr was shaking his head, and the half-smile of latent optimism vanished from Jiří’s lips.
“No. You don’t know Magda, Nell. I wouldn’t wish her upon you. She wants him out. Fine. I understand that. She has been through hell with the police. It’s a justifiable paranoia. But if she has any bones to pick over with Jiří, she’ll come looking. Better by far that she finds him here. We’ll clear out the box room. A six-footer wouldn’t fit in there, but he will.”
“Box room? A fucking box room?” Jiří said.
“That’s it, Jiří. Go on pushing your luck. And I say now, your being here carries conditions … you bring no trouble down on me or Nell.”
The boy sensed victory and was grinning.
“You don’t have to speak, Jiří. That might be too much to ask. Just nod your head if you understand me.”
§136
Mid-February
On her route from her office to Petr’s apartment, Nell had become accustomed to seeing graffiti. It seemed almost to be a Czech tradition. A public forum in a country that had none. Of late, since the change at the top, graffiti, or more precisely slogans, seemed to have mushroomed. The anti-government slogans were still there, aging and fading—but the new stuff seemed like sloganeering for the sake of sloganeering, a delight in that other Czech tradition—absurdity. Credo quia absurdum.
The long slogan, only yards from the National Theatre, sprayed rapidly and spelt badly, as though its author had had to run for it, was a quotation from absurdity’s master, Václav Havel: “He who doesn’t know how to wade through rye …”
She knew how it ended: “… must go to Prague for his wits.”
It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have to mean anything. That was Havel’s point. To spray it on a wall was pointless.
But the one on the stone flags at the far end of the bridge, close to her own apartment, in English, “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” surely intended meaning?
And on
a pair of dirty green gates directly opposite Petr’s door, “Remember What the White Queen Said.”
They were a cut above the usual graffiti. Someone had gone to the trouble of cutting a stencil for each word.
§137
Jiří’s box room was less than six feet by six. Into this he had fitted a pitifully narrow mattress, just leaving room for a desk and a chair. When the door was opened it banged into a corner of the desk—as it did now, when Nell stuck her head around it to ask if he wanted a hot drink.
“It’s freezing outside.”
“I know,” he replied. “I’ve been out in it. Not been home long at all.”
Why he had been out was obvious.
The stencils for “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast” and “Remember What the White Queen Said” were pinned to the wall above his desk, still wet, dripping red paint down the colourless wallpaper.
“What does ‘Remember What the White Queen Said’ mean?”
“It’s Lewis Carroll. Surely it doesn’t need explanation?”
“I suppose not.”
Nell paused, wondering how much she could ask before he clammed up or exploded.
“Jiří, why are you doing this now?”
“It was too dangerous to do much before Christmas, or have you forgotten the night we met.”
“No, I haven’t. But … the old guard is gone. Or if not gone, going.”
“Meet the new guard, same as the old guard.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“What does one expect from an old guard?”
“I don’t know. What does one expect from an old guard?”
“That they be old. What does one expect from a new guard?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. And what do we get?”
“Whatever I say now will be wrong, so …”
“We get silence. Six weeks of Dubček in power and six weeks of silence. He has to say something or the change of leadership means nothing. We’re drowning in Dubček’s silence.”
A grin spread across his face. When he thought of something, a word or phrase he might drop like a bomb into conversation, the boy was uncontainable. For all that he lied he was a poor liar. His face betrayed him.
“You must have seen those sausage stalls? They’re everywhere.”
“Of course.”
“You know what utopenci are? Pickled sausages, in big jars, they sell them with gherkins. But utopenci translates as Ertrunkene—drowned men. We’re all drowned men, until he speaks.”
This was undeniable. Petr had said much the same thing only days ago. Brandt had sent her, tongue-in-cheek, a Disney postcard of the Pekinese dog from Lady and the Tramp wearing a muzzle, over which he had scrawled the initials “A.D.?”—Aleksandr Dubček.
“And what’s that?”
Nell pointed at a collage on Jiří’s desk—letters cut and pasted. Several discarded attempts littered the floor.
“I’m designing the masthead for our newspaper.”
“Whose newspaper?”
“Ours … us students … the Pranksters.”
“What does it stand for?”
“Skřitek Škatule—Goblin Box. We are a country of demons and elves, water sprites and goblins. Czechs are very superstitious.”
Another Czech tradition.
“Yes,” she said. “I had noticed. And where will you get the paper?”
“Oh … such German practicality. I dunno … behind the first office door I find that isn’t locked.”
“You’d steal it?”
“Nell … please! I’d liberate it. Now, are you going to call me a hooligan again?”
“No. I’m not. You don’t need to steal, Jiří. I run a foundation to foster the arts. I can give you paper.”
§138
Somewhere in the České Středohoří: Late February
Wilderness had mastered the tine harrow. Also the chain harrow, which, after all, was nothing more than a bundle of chains dragged behind a tractor—and the disc harrow, available with thirty-six, seventy-two or a hundred-plus blades, which could seemingly slice ham, dice carrot and shred lettuce. God alone knew what it might do if actually towed across a field.
In the meantime he had actually managed to sell a dozen assorted harrows and four tractors and had an order for a combine harvester from the largest Collective in Bohemia, once they had been through all one hundred and forty-four levels of administration, all the way to the Fat Controller.
Much to his surprise, Erdbahn were paying him—every so often he received a Czech cheque—and it occurred to him that for the first time in his life he had a racket that was legitimate—Erdbahn commission plus MI6 salary.
He had swapped six copies of Metamorphosis with Tibor. He had no idea what was on the microdots. London did not tell him, and Tibor took the attitude that the less he knew the less he could reveal—Wilderness concurred, whilst lamenting silently that the process reduced him from spy to postman. At least postmen got a uniform and a bike.
The interest, as such, came in the comments Tibor threw into every meeting as almost casual asides, one gnat’s hair short of gossip.
It was a bollock-freezer of a day. Tibor had brought a flask of coffee, which he shared with Wilderness as they stood on the hilltop in a biting wind.
“Do you know who I mean by General Sejna?”
“No. Who he?”
“He is a nobody. A nobody who will finally bring down President Novotny.”
“Really?”
“There were rumours a while ago that he had been the instigator of a coup to unseat the reformers. This would be January, just after Novotny was made to resign as First Secretary. Sejna tried to rally the military to reinstate him—supposedly he gained the support of an entire tank division before it all collapsed around him. He’s fled the country. In the last couple of days, I’m told.”
This was shocking, but scarcely for the obvious reason.
“Why has Dubček said nothing about any of this?”
“Why has Dubček said nothing about anything? He has been in power nearly two months. Two months of deafening silence. But he’ll have to speak now—if he doesn’t he’ll miss the opportunity to get rid of Novotny for good. It’s not just that Sejna was on the old Central Committee. He was in business, if that’s the phrase, with Novotny’s son. A pair of playboys. In the midst of the most tightly controlled state in the Warsaw Pact they ran fiddles that would make the typical British spiv look like a saint. Not nylons and perfume … Jaguars and Porsches and Mercedes. A corruption so blatant it taints anyone who knew. And Old Novotny certainly knew. There is not a single central committee member past or present who would defend Sejna—he’s fucked all their wives and the most unforgiving creature on this Earth is a cuckold. They’ll see him in hell before they lift a finger—and right now I think that goes for Novotny too. It’s just a matter of days.”
§139
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: March 22nd
—Novotny has finally gone. There is the biggest buzz in the city. If you want a newspaper it pays to get up early. They’re all sold out by 6 am. Everyone is interested. I ask myself, ‘can it last?’ It’s like Carnaby Street with politics.
§140
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: April 7th
—Rumour, but one with a lot of credibility to it. The suicide rate is rising. I seem to hear of some old guard CP or StB man killing himself every day. No attempt to hush it up. I could get names if you wish, but why bother? Yesterday’s men.
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: May 4th
—Dubček, Cernik et al. are in Moscow. I have reports of a flight at midnight. No details.
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: May 10th
—Half the Warsaw Pact forces seem to be gathered on the border. Dubček has told the country it was all pre-arranged ‘manoeuvres’. I’ve met no one who believe
s him. I think he was taken by surprise.
I don’t know what Dubček asked for in Moscow last week, but this appears to be Brezhnev’s reply. Scary, eh?
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: May 18th
—A turn-up for the book. Kosygin is here—well, you know that—but he’s utterly ignoring the Czech leadership, Acc. to our man ‘Zoltan’ he’s taking the waters at Karlovy Vary, twice a day. Either he’s got a touch of rheumatism or he’s come just to wave two fingers at Dubček.
Pussy-in-the-Well to White Rabbit: May 19th
—Biggest demo I’ve ever seen last night. Must have been 10,000 or more. The cops did nothing to stop it. Not a skull cracked. Interesting new slogans. We’re past ‘Make Love Not War’, so corny after all, and into stuff so long you couldn’t spray it on a wall: “Long Live the Soviet Union, But At Its Own Expense.” Not poetry, not catchy … but oh the defiance. Six months ago the cops would have put a few hundred in jail and as many in hospital.
§141
Prague: June 25th
Every so often, a so often that soon became every other day, Nell would pass a painted slogan that she knew was Jiří’s work. No one else was as neat—and while many of the small army of sloganeers wrote in English, Jiří seemed unique in his fondness for, and belief in, rock ’n’ roll lyrics, the subversive power of which was largely lost on Nell.
WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US AGAINST
Jiří was at his desk cutting up more cardboard when she got home to Petr’s apartment.
“Barrandov?” she asked simply.
“Yep. He said to tell you it’ll be another all-nighter.”
She paused in the doorway, wondering whether to tackle him or not.
“I saw one of yours today. You’ve been busy.”
“No I haven’t. I’ve only done two today. Which did you see, the John Lennon—’Strawberry Fields Forever’?”
“No. It would be the other one. It began with ‘Stop.’ I wondered what it meant.”