Masaryk Station

by David Downing

  Walking back to the Europa, he wondered what Winterman and Co would do with these interviews. Just print them verbatim, he supposed. It would be good propaganda for the Soviets in the short run; but the CIA would be playing a long game, establishing the magazine’s reputation for political impartiality, so that when they eventually stuck in the knife, it would be that much more effective.

  Sitting down to another excellent meal, Russell wondered how much easier his life would have been if he’d just done what he was told. Why hadn’t he? What had made him the pain in the arse that Winterman and others thought him? His father had been conventional to a fault, his mother more rebellious in spirit, although not when it really mattered. The First War had confirmed Russell’s belief that the status quo was a kind of freewheeling murderous cock-up that only served the rich, but he’d felt that since he was about fourteen. A born communist, except that when the time came, he had rejected the comrades as well.

  What did it matter? He was who he was, approaching fifty with the same basic anger, a disgust that seemed to be deepening, and a lack of answers that was almost comical. The only trick, he suspected, was to look for love in the margins, but even they seemed narrower by the year.

  Back in his room, he was preparing for bed when the softest of knocks sounded on his door.

  A man was outside, middle-aged, with luxuriant iron-grey hair which flopped across his forehead. He was wearing what looked like two halves of different suits and a white shirt smeared with egg stains. He also had a finger raised to his lips.

  Russell let the man in, and followed him into the bathroom. Once the tap was running, his visitor curtly offered the agreed password—‘spring is beautiful in Prague’—and introduced himself as Karel. He didn’t, however, have affidavits stuffed in his pockets. ‘They wouldn’t be safe in your room, and these days foreigners are often stopped and searched on the street, so we must hand them to you at the final moment. When do you leave?’

  ‘At six o’clock on Monday, from Wilson Station. The evening train to Vienna.’

  ‘Okay. You know where the National Museum is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are two entrances, one at the top of the boulevard and a second on the far side, in the gardens. Get to the first at around three thirty P.M., check your suitcase as if you’re intent on touring the exhibits until it’s time to go to the station, then shake your shadow and leave by the back entrance. From that door you can see the end of Římskã Street, and there is a small café, with a dark-red awning, about fifty metres down. There’s no name outside, but should you need to ask, locals know it as the Galuška Café. Be there by five, and order a coffee. Within a few minutes a departing customer will offer you a newspaper that they’ve finished with, and the affidavits will be inside. Once you have them, go back to the museum, pick up your suitcase and shadow, and walk to the station. Understood?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Good. And good luck.’ He gave Russell a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and headed for the outer door.

  Russell reached to turn off the tap, then remembered he hadn’t yet brushed his teeth. ‘Some more cloak-and-dagger to look forward to,’ he told his reflection in the mirror.

  Sunday morning was sunny, warm, and ideal for sightseeing, but Russell reluctantly decided that Lisa’s daughter Uschi had a prior claim on his time. Over breakfast he thought the matter through, and decided that there was no cause for subterfuge. The communist government had not, as far as he knew, introduced any new restrictions on the movements of foreigners, so a morning trip out to Kolin shouldn’t set any legal tripwires twanging. And unless the Czech Embassy in Berlin was keeping its business to itself, the authorities here in Prague would already know that Lisa Sundgren, the former Liesel Hausmann, was trying to track down her daughter Uschi. What could be more natural than her asking him to look up the girl while he was in the vicinity?

  There seemed no reason why Uschi should suffer from the attention. The Czech authorities already knew who her parents were, and she couldn’t help the fact that her father had been a wealthy industrialist.

  So he would go to Kolin that morning, and take his shadow along for the ride, because shaking him off would indeed look suspicious, and make him harder to ditch on Monday, when he really was doing something illicit.

  His latest shadow—the third so far—was lurking in the lobby, as yet unaware of the journey in store. The Kolin trains went from Masaryk Station, which in the past he had always used on his trips to and from Berlin—it was here Giminich’s goons had intercepted him seven years earlier. The Nazis had called it the Hibernerbahnhof, but the original name had been restored in 1945. As he walked in through the gabled glass front of the terminus Russell wondered if the new government would change it again, now that it served as a reminder of the son’s suspicious demise.

  There was a train to Kolin in twenty-five minutes. He bought a return ticket and took a seat on the concourse. His shadow, who had followed him into the booking office, and doubtless enquired as to where he was going, now strode across to one of the public phone booths, and peered out at Russell before dialling a number. After brief conversation, he re-emerged and took a seat of his own. Head Office had apparently sanctioned their jaunt to Kolin.

  The forty-mile journey took almost two hours, the train squeaking to a halt at every conceivable platform, and a few other places beside. The booking office clerk at Kolin had never heard of Karlova Street, but one of the waiting passengers had—it was out on the other side of town, a fifteen-minute walk away. Once through the centre, he should follow the smell of the brewery.

  His shadow had walked straight through to the forecourt, for reasons that now became clear—he’d been met by a local colleague in a Skoda Popular. They and their car now settled into Russell’s wake, purring along behind him at walking pace as he headed across town. Once through the centre, a group of boys playing football gave him further directions to Karlova Street, and soon he was walking down a line of workers’ cottages, looking for Number 17.

  A woman in her fifties or sixties answered his knock.

  ‘Uschi Hausmann?’ he asked, knowing it couldn’t be her.

  She shut the door without a word, but gently enough to suggest she might be back.

  A young man re-opened it. There was an enamel red star in his jacket lapel, and he didn’t look particularly friendly, but to Russell’s relief he spoke passable Russian. ‘What’s your business with Uschi?’ he asked aggressively.

  Russell explained that he had a message from her mother.

  ‘What message? Her mother abandoned her.’

  ‘The message is for her.’

  He thought about that for a few seconds, then stepped aside for Russell to enter. A girl of about twenty was waiting in the front room, looking anxious. Her wavy blonde hair framed a strikingly beautiful face. She spoke German of course, but insisted on translating everything for the young man, whom she introduced as Ladislav. ‘I thought my mother was dead,’ was the first thing she said after Russell had explained his reason for being there. ‘Where has she been all these years?’

  Russell explained as best he could.

  ‘So she’s in Berlin. Why didn’t she come herself?’

  ‘The authorities won’t give her a visa. You may not know it, but your government in Prague has been restricting travel in and out of the country over the past few months.’

  The boy bristled at that. ‘It’s the Western governments who have been making things difficult. They send many spies—everyone knows it.’

  ‘Whoever’s to blame,’ Russell told Uschi, ‘your mother can’t get to you. So she is hoping that you can come to her. I’m sure the government wouldn’t stand in the way of a family reunion,’ he added, more for the young man’s benefit than because he really believed it.

  Ladislav was shaking his head. ‘This is out of the question. We are getting married in a few weeks.’

  ‘Ah. I understand. Would you like to write to yo
ur mother?’ he asked Uschi. ‘I could take a letter back with me.’

  She looked uncertain.

  ‘Ladislav said that you think she abandoned you,’ Russell said. ‘I have to tell you that she believes she saved you from the Gestapo by sending you off to the mountains, and that when they came for her, she had no choice but to run. That if she hadn’t abandoned you, you would be an orphan.’

  ‘It’s been so long.’

  ‘America is a long way away, and she had a baby to look after. You have a little sister.’

  She said something to Ladislav in Czech, which Russell guessed was a plea for permission. When he nodded, she turned back to Russell, and said she would write the letter. Would he like some tea while he waited?

  Now that the main matter was decided, Ladislav seemed to relax, and the two of them spent the next twenty minutes discussing Czechoslovakia’s future. The lad obviously cared for his country, fellow citizens and soon-to-be wife, but Russell wouldn’t have entered him in a political perspicacity contest. He kept his own fears for Czechoslovakia to himself, and hoped that in this one instance he would be proved wrong.

  Eventually Uschi emerged, her letter written and sealed. ‘I hope my mother understands,’ she told Russell. ‘That I’m grown-up now, and my place is here. I’ve included a photograph of Ladislav and me, so that she’ll know.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be happy that you’re happy,’ Russell told her. ‘And I’m sure she’ll write back, now that she knows exactly where you are. And later, when things are a bit more settled, maybe she can visit you or you can visit her.’

  ‘America is a long way away,’ Ladislav insisted, but Russell could see the young man was drawn by the prospect. As he turned to leave, he remembered the Skoda outside. ‘I was followed when I came here,’ he told them, ‘and I expect they’ll follow me back again. But later, someone will want to ask you what we talked about. I just thought I’d warn you, so it’s not a surprise.’

  Walking back to the station, the car twenty metres behind him, he thought about Lisa Sundgren. He’d never met her of course, but they shared one terrible thing—both had been forced to choose between leaving a child and almost certain death. He had never really hesitated, because both were forms of abandonment, and the former at least held hope of eventual reunion, but he was still acutely aware of what havoc his sudden departure had wreaked on Paul’s psyche.

  And now, just like his own son, Lisa’s long-lost daughter was getting married, setting the distance between them in stone. From this point forth the best either could hope for were letters full of news and strangers’ names, pictures of grandchildren, and once-in-a-blue-moon visits.

  The Soviet response to Effi’s challenge—or at least its first instalment—arrived on Monday morning. The top-grade ration card given to first-rank artists was being withdrawn, on the grounds that she was no longer actively pursuing her career in Berlin. Her rejection of the DEFA script proved as much.

  This was annoying, but hardly shattering. With Russell’s multiple employers and Zarah’s American connection their extended family wasn’t short on privilege, economic or otherwise.

  The second instalment, which appeared at Effi’s door that afternoon, was of another order altogether. The official from City Hall looked meek enough, but the message he brought was potentially devastating. Irregularities had been discovered in their adoption of Rosa, which was now to be reviewed. There were doubts as to whether sufficient diligence had been exerted in the search for Rosa’s real father, doubts as to whether a former star of the National Socialist film industry could be considered a suitable parent.

  Effi treated the official with what seemed appropriate disdain, but dissolved into tears the moment the door closed behind him. It was all absurd, but what did right or reason have to do with it? They were playing their games to win, and they didn’t care how.

  The film director Jaromír Císař was short and wiry, with longish black hair and busy eyes. His Smichov apartment had a distinctly Bohemian air, which wasn’t that common in Gottwald’s Bohemia. Shelves and tables were crowded with exotic objets d’art, walls plastered with film stills. Some of the latter were doubtless from Císař’s own films, but others Russell recognised—the dentist’s chair scene from Horse Feathers, Dietrich wreathed in smoke on the Shanghai Express, Arletty and a love-sick Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis.

  Císař was talkative enough, but Russell had the sense of someone calibrating his answers quite carefully. He was, he said, convinced that good films could be made in the current political climate, but the way he said it made you wonder whether they would be. ‘Let me put it this way—everyone knows that in capitalist countries commercial pressures distort the artistic process. Well, we have to admit it, so do political pressures in the new socialist countries. In both environments, artists have to make compromises that they don’t really want to make. And in both environments it’s possible to … I am looking for the right verb here, and the one that comes to mind is “smuggle”—so, it’s possible to smuggle good work past the distorters.’

  ‘So socialism offers no advantage to the artist?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say that. Under capitalism, the freedom to create is spurious, because it so rarely transcends the individual. Under socialism, the artist is invited, encouraged, to use his creativity for the society as a whole. Which means that in the more popular forms—like cinema—we can offer something more than shallow entertainment. There is a deeper purpose at work.’

  The more Císař talked, the more Russell wished he’d actually seen one of the man’s films. He remembered Effi being complimentary about one of them, and said as much to the director.

  ‘You are married to Effi Koenen! She is one my favourite German actors—some of her recent work with DEFA—well, it’s been superb. She always had a face made for the camera, but these days … Look,’ Císař said, leaping up and striding across to the wall of pictures, ‘here she is in The Man I Shall Kill.’

  And there she was, playing Greta Larstein. It wasn’t a still that Russell had seen before, and it felt strange finding it there, on a Prague apartment wall.

  ‘She doesn’t speak Czech by any chance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, maybe I will work in Berlin one day,’ he said, still looking at the photo. ‘What a face she has!’ He closed his eyes, as if picturing her in front of his camera.

  As they said goodbye at the door, Císař twice insisted that Russell pass on his respect and admiration for Effi’s recent work, and he loudly lamented the fact that any flowers he sent her would be dead before they reached Berlin.

  Russell walked down to the river, pleased that someone Effi admired liked her so much in return. In the 1930s she had often seemed too good for the roles she was asked to play, but over the past few years most of the parts had given her talents full rein. At least one good thing had come out of their unfortunate Russian connections, he thought, as he walked out across the Legii Bridge. The Charles was divided by Střelecký Island at this point, and down to his left he could see the site of his first contact with the Resistance in the last month of peace, a bench now occupied by two old women. One day he would like to arrive in Prague with no clandestine meetings in prospect. Some hope.

  Feeling hungry, Russell walked into the first decent-looking restaurant he found on Národní. Anticipating a likely dearth of edible fare on his evening train, he ordered three courses and a bottle of expensive Moravian wine. The American taxpayers would have to fork up, which served them right for employing Winterman.

  It was three P.M. by the time he got back to the Europa, which made packing and checking out a hurried affair, but the local clocks were only just striking the half-hour when he passed through the National Museum’s front entrance, the usual distance ahead of his StB shadow. After handing his suitcase in at the cloakroom, he leisurely sauntered on into the first gallery, abruptly changing pace the moment he was out of sight. His tail, having lost him, would hav
e no choice but to stay with his luggage.

  He found the back entrance without much trouble, lingered a while to make sure he had thrown off the shadow, then started down Římskã. He could already see the dark-red awning, a splash of colour in the grey stone street. Or perhaps, the thought crossed his mind, a red rag to a bull.

  At least this treff, as the Soviets called such meetings, was in a public place. If the UDBA officers had shot him dead at Pograjac’s lonely Belgrade apartment, the rest of the world would have been none the wiser.

  Only two of the tables were occupied, one by a middle-aged man in a suit, the other by a young woman in a blue summer dress. Both had folded newspapers in front of them.

  As instructed, Russell ordered a cup of Viennese coffee. He still felt full from lunch, and one sip was sufficient to deter any more.

  A shadow crossed his table, and the girl was standing over him, holding out the paper and saying something in Czech. The stress in her voice was palpable, but then she didn’t have an MGB help number.

  ‘Dekuji,’ he said with a smile, using up most of his Czech vocabulary.

  She nodded abruptly and walked out through the open door.

  He carefully opened the paper, making sure that anything falling out would land in his lap. An envelope did.

  Knowing it was out of sight, he let it lie there while making a show of refolding the paper and examining its front page. He only recognised a few of the words, but the picture featured a smiling Klement Gottwald, surrounded by eager young children. After a few moments he held the paper up as if he was reading the bottom half, and slickly moved the envelope from lap to inside pocket.