Masaryk Station

by David Downing

  It was dawn on Sunday before Russell had a seat on one, and seven in the morning before he stepped blearily down on to the tarmac at Tempelhof. Reaching home to find Effi and Rosa at breakfast, he grabbed a fork and took turns stealing scrambled eggs off their plates.

  ‘Did it all go all right?’ Effi asked, when Rosa left them for a few moments.

  ‘Better than I hoped. How’s Rosa?’

  ‘She’s worried about us both going away. She doesn’t actually say so, and I do keep reminding her that we’ll only be gone for two or three nights, but I know she is.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, let’s make sure we have a good day today.’

  ‘We’re going to Zarah’s for lunch. And Bill will probably be there.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be good.’

  ‘Oh, and Ströhm rang for you. He sounded disappointed when I told him you were away, and that Monday we were both going off again.’

  ‘He must be feeling the pressure,’ Russell said.

  ‘The baby or the Russians?’

  ‘He can’t wait for the baby. It’ll be the Russians. Stuck between the devil and the deep red sea.’

  ‘The devil being Comrade Ulbricht.’

  ‘Or the Americans. He’s spoilt for choice.’

  Effi dismissed it all with a wave of the hand. ‘Anyway, I’m packed. And these,’ she said, pointing them out, ‘are my audition reels.’ There were four of them, each in small round cans of roughly similar size.

  ‘I hope Merzhanov’s isn’t a lot bigger,’ Russell observed. ‘It’ll stand out if it is.’

  Effi shook her head. ‘We can empty one of these and rewind the new film on to it,’ she said.

  Russell gave her an admiring look. ‘You should have been the secret agent, and I should have been the beauty.’

  Bill Carnforth was at Zarah’s when they arrived, peeling potatoes in a rather fetching apron. His news was more sobering—having allowed a resumption of rail traffic between Berlin and the Western zones, the Soviets had turned their attention to the only road link, and closed its bridge over the Elbe, ostensibly for repairs. ‘They’re just messing with us,’ Carnforth said. ‘And they’re gonna keep on doing it until we throw up our hands in despair and head back home.’

  ‘And you should have seen it on Ku’damm yesterday,’ Zarah interjected. ‘Thousands of people spending their money like they couldn’t wait to get rid of it. If they don’t reform the currency soon, we’ll be back to barter.’

  ‘And if they do,’ Russell mused, ‘then God only knows how the Soviets will react.’

  ‘But what could they do?’ Zarah wanted to know. ‘Money is money.’

  ‘I think they’re doing it already, honey,’ her fiancé observed.

  ‘You mean blocking the autobahn?’

  ‘And the railway.’

  ‘But you won’t let them cut us off,’ Zarah insisted, as if he was the one who would take the decision.

  ‘I wish I was certain of that,’ he said, placing another peeled potato in the saucepan. ‘Me and General Clay would give them a fight, but it won’t be our call. The politicians will have to decide.’

  ‘They’ll stand up to the Russians eventually,’ Zarah said confidently. ‘But it still doesn’t seem like a very good time to go waltzing off to Prague,’ she told Effi. ‘Couldn’t you wait a few weeks?’

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ Effi told her. A year ago she would have filled Zarah in on what was actually happening, but since Carnforth had appeared on the scene she and Russell had opted not to burden her sister with a possible conflict of loyalties. ‘And I do want to see Císař,’ she added. ‘You liked that film of his you saw.’

  ‘Did I? What was it?’

  ‘Beloved Morning.’

  ‘Oh yes, that was good. So you’re back on Wednesday or Thursday?’

  ‘I think so,’ Effi told her

  ‘Can we meet you at the station?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘No, sweetheart. We don’t know which train we’ll be on, and it might be very late.’

  The girl looked crestfallen. ‘Will you wake me when you get back?’

  ‘Of course we will.’

  That afternoon they all went to see a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical at a recently re-opened local cinema, and half-danced their way back to Zarah’s flat. There was an undamaged double staircase fronting one of the bombsites on Kant Strasse, and this provided Effi and Russell with the opportunity to recreate one particular scene. Their attempt seemed more than creditable to Russell, and he failed to see why their audience found it so amusing.

  Back at Carmer Strasse that evening, Rosa did a drawing of the two of them whirling each other around in the street. Examining it over her shoulder, Russell felt close to tears.

  Janica

  It was chaos at Anhalter Station on Tuesday morning. Overnight the Soviets had decreed that any Berliners wanting a ticket to the Western Zones could only buy it at Friedrichstrasse Station, and every available railway employee at Anhalter was surrounded by people haplessly protesting the inconvenience. But it was much more than that, Russell realised. As Friedrichstrasse Station was in the Soviet zone, the Russians had effectively awarded themselves a veto over who might leave the city.

  It didn’t affect him and Effi for now. They weren’t leaving Stalin’s new empire, and they already had their train tickets. Their route was the usual one via Dresden, which Russell had taken in March 1939 with the German naval plans concealed in a false-bottomed suitcase. He still sometimes wondered how he’d managed not to soil himself during that particular border inspection. On that occasion he’d had a publicity shot of Effi to divert the guards; now he had the real thing.

  It was a bright summer morning, and soon they were rolling through a healthy-looking countryside, the fields of flourishing crops only blighted by the occasional hulk of a burnt-out tank. These were all German, and Russell guessed that they had been left beside the line deliberately, as a visible reminder of who had won the war.

  Their train made reasonable time by post-war standards, but it still took three hours to reach Dresden, which had the dubious distinction of looking even worse than Berlin. Russell shared the opinion, widely-held among Germans, that the air attack on Dresden in February 1945 had been a war crime, and he saw no reason to stop there—as far as he was concerned all those responsible for the Allied bombing of civilian targets should have ended up in the Nuremberg dock.

  He had once said as much to an RAF wing-commander.

  ‘Those were brave men!’ the man had barked out in response.

  ‘I’m sure a lot of them were,’ Russell had replied. ‘And so were a lot of the Germans who committed war crimes in Russia.’

  The RAF man had looked as if he wanted to hit him, but had just about managed to restrain himself.

  Why were people so stupid? Did they really thinking bravery always went hand in hand with virtue?

  As their train sat in Dresden platform, Russell told Effi about the exchange.

  She smiled at him. ‘After two thousand years of this,’ she said, waving a hand at the partly-cleared ruins beyond the tracks, ‘you’d think men would step aside and give women a chance. But I don’t see it happening.’

  ‘Touché,’ Russell observed.

  Forty minutes later they reached the border, and climbed out to take their walk through the inspection shed. The two of them were almost waved through, as Russell had assumed they would be—people entering Czechoslovakia at the state’s invitation were unlikely to be searched. Most of the people travelling in the opposite direction, however, weren’t so lucky. The Czechoslovak natives presumably all had permission to leave, but it looked as if each and every one of them was being subjected to a rigorous search. By contrast, the only obvious foreigners—two Germans and a Russian—were barely inspected at all.

  As they walked forward to their waiting train, Effi drew what seemed the logical conclusion. ‘I think I should come back alone.’

  ‘I don’t think …’
/>   ‘I’ll be fine. They were only searching Czechs, and as long as I don’t have you standing behind me, making me nervous … and we did talk about you and Janica going on to Vienna.’

  ‘And you pointed out that the train toilet was the logical place to put on the makeup. If she goes with me there won’t be an opportunity, unless we find some way of sneaking her into our hotel.’

  ‘That would be crazy,’ Effi said. ‘She’ll have to do without the makeup. She’s only twenty-nine, for heaven’s sake—I looked the same at twenty-nine as I did at twenty-one. And there’s another thing. After what we saw this morning it looks like Berlin will get harder to leave. If we take Janica back there, we may not be able to get her out again.’

  It was a good point, but hardly relevant to Russell’s main concern. ‘I don’t want you bearing all the risk,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to get used to it. Don’t you see? It makes so much more sense not to put all our eggs in one basket. If you and Janica go on Vienna, and for some dreadful reason she’s stopped at the border, then at least we’ll still have the film.’

  ‘And a very disappointed Merzhanov,’ Russell pointed out. But he would face that problem if and when it arose. He hated the thought of Effi carrying the film out alone, but he could see she was right. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’m not happy about it.’

  ‘You will be when it works.’

  The Czechoslovak railways seemed in worst shape than the German, and it was early evening before their train entered the outskirts of the capital. As they rumbled into Wilson Station, Russell remembered Karel hustling him into the bathroom. ‘When we get to our hotel room, be careful what you say,’ he advised Effi. ‘It’ll probably be bugged.’

  ‘Will there be hidden cameras to film our love-making?’

  ‘God only knows.’

  They barely had their feet on the platform before a familiar face turned up. ‘This is Petra Klíma,’ Russell said, introducing her to Effi. ‘Ministry of Culture,’ he added.

  ‘I loved your film,’ Klíma told Effi, as if she’d only made the one.

  There was a car waiting outside, along with a young male chauffeur. He quickly stamped out his cigarette when they saw them approaching, then opened a door with studied insolence, as if regretting the show of deference. Once Effi and Russell were in the back, Klíma joined him in the front.

  Their hotel was supposedly close to Císař’s apartment, and the drive to Smichov took about twenty minutes. En route they passed the sites of several lacunae in Russell’s espionage career, but given Klíma’s probable fluency in German he forbore from pointing them out to Effi. It looked as though their time in Prague would be highly supervised, which might be a problem when it came to meeting Janica.

  The hotel was on Zborovska, one block west of the Charles River. It didn’t look much from the outside, but their suite was large and well-furnished. Once Klíma had left them to get settled in, they left the tap running noisily in the wash-basin and sat either end of a brimming hot bath, discussing their plan for the next two days. They were still there when Klíma started banging on the outer door, intent on escorting them down to dinner.

  While Effi was dressing, Russell told the Czech woman that their travel plans had changed, that while he still planned on travelling on to Vienna, Effi would be going straight back to Berlin. Could Klíma check the Vienna trains on Wednesday, and arrange the appropriate permit?

  She didn’t foresee any problem.

  There were no other guests in the dining room, which seemed a trifle strange, and Klíma’s explanation—that people ate late in Prague—bore no relation to Russell’s experience. She didn’t sit with them, claiming she’d already eaten, but sat alone at a table near the door, as if on sentry duty. Her German, they’d discovered, was as good as her English.

  The food and wine were both excellent, but the thought of microphones close by inhibited conversation. After coffee, when Russell announced that they were going to take a romantic stroll by the river, the Czech woman said she would join them.

  ‘How are we going to get rid of her?’ Effi asked Russell, once back in their bathroom with the tap full on.

  Russell had already come up with an answer. ‘After lunch tomorrow, you’ll say how you’ve never been here before …’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘… And ask to see some sights. I’ll say I’m coming, too, and then I’ll drop out at the last moment. I’ll say I’m tired, and am coming back here for a snooze.’

  ‘You are fifty next year.’

  ‘Thanks for reminding me. I still have some youthful vigour, you know.’

  ‘Remember the cameras!’

  ‘They’ll be in the bedroom.’

  The appointment with Jaromír Císař was at ten the next morning. He was clearly overjoyed to meet Effi, kissing her several times on both cheeks and cupping her face in his hands to study it more thoroughly. Russell would have slapped him, but she took it all in her stride. Bloody thespians, he thought, echoing a character in a movie whose name he couldn’t remember.

  ‘What a lucky man!’ was all Císař said to him, but even that was four words more than Klíma received. She just hovered in the background, smiling an uncertain smile.

  One of the apartment’s two bedrooms had been converted into a projection room, with four seats facing a plain white wall. Císař had already seen two of the sampled films, so they watched the rushes from Effi’s performances in the other two. The director sat with a rapt look on his face, expressing his appreciation of a particular look, gesture, or spoken line by patting Effi’s hand with his own.

  ‘I already have a project in mind for us,’ he told Effi when they emerged. ‘An adaption of a book by one of our best young writers, which our Culture Minister has publicly praised, so there should be no problems from that direction.’ He shot Klíma a glance, and received an angry one back.

  ‘What’s it about?’ Effi asked.

  ‘It’s about who we are. Czechoslovaks, that is, but also human beings. The central character, which you would play, is a Sudeten German mother. People assume that all Sudeten Germans were eager to join the Reich in 1938, but they weren’t. This woman’s family opposes the Nazis, and she loses a son as a result. And seven years later, she loses another one, when the Czechs take out their frustrations on all the Germans they can lay their hands on. And through it all, she refuses to grow bitter—she’s convinced that people are people, no matter which group they think they belong to. When she finds out that her daughter is having a love affair with the son of one of the Czech vigilantes—a nod to Romeo and Juliet, of course—she moves heaven and Earth to save the girl from the wrath of her own third son. That’s a very crude summary, but you get the idea. When I’ve finished the adaption’—he nodded towards the desk, where a pile of pages and an overfull ashtray flanked his typewriter—‘I shall send you a copy.’

  Their leave-taking was extended by another long examination of Effi’s face from various angles, but eventually Císař let them go. The Skoda was waiting outside, the driver smoking another cigarette, which he took his time stubbing out. ‘Hollywood suddenly seems less appealing,’ Effi remarked once they were seated.

  ‘I don’t suppose Mickey Mouse has heard of the Sudetenland,’ Russell added flippantly.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But they do make good movies in Hollywood. Just not the sort that he makes.’

  The car was on the move.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Russell asked.

  ‘To lunch,’ Klíma told him.

  The restaurant was only a few minutes away, and a table had been reserved in the garden, which overlooked the Charles and offered a panoramic view of Malá Strana and its looming castle. This time Klíma did eat with them, and Russell set out to disarm the young woman with questions about her family. It half-worked, but no matter how many times he offered the bottle of wine, she refused to take a refill. She was, he decided, depress
ingly single-minded.

  He asked if she’d remembered his train ticket. ‘Yes,’ she said, digging in her handbag, ‘I forgot to give it to you.’ The hand emerged with an envelope. ‘Here it is. The Vienna express leaves Wilson Station at 10 A.M.—that’s half an hour after Fraulein Koenen’s train to Berlin.’

  Russell pocketed the envelope and thanked her, glad that his train was departing after Effi’s. After his recent experiences in Prague he hadn’t fancied leaving her on the platform.

  ‘So what shall we do this afternoon?’ Klíma asked, like a mother inviting suggestions from the children. ‘Now that your business is done, some sightseeing perhaps. Prague is a very beautiful city.’

  ‘I’ve been here many times,’ Russell told her, ‘and I think I’d rather have a lie-down at the hotel. But I’m sure Effi would like to see some sights.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Effi agreed enthusiastically.

  Klíma looked flustered for a moment. ‘But how would you find your hotel?’ she asked, adding with more than a hint of suspicion that she hadn’t thought he spoke the language.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Russell replied cheerfully. ‘But you can hail me a cab and tell the driver where to take me.’

  She looked relieved at that. ‘Yes, why not?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But first I must, how do you say it in English? Powder my nose.’

  It took her a long time, long enough to ensure that someone would be waiting when he got back to the Slovan.

  When she returned they all walked out to the pavement, and a cab was duly waved down. Klíma gave the driver his instructions, which included an awful lot more than the name of their hotel, if the cabbie’s face was any guide. Russell gave Effi a parting kiss, wished both women an enjoyable afternoon, and climbed into the front seat.

  ‘And you have a good rest,’ Effi said sympathetically.

  As Russell had hoped, his driver headed for the Legii Bridge. There were traffic lights at the far end, and his 50-50 chance came good—they were red. He slid the $10 note into the other man’s pocket with one hand, opened the nearside door with the other, and deftly stepped on to the road. ‘Cigaretten,’ Russell said, miming a smoke and raising a hand in farewell. The cabbie sat there stupidly for a few seconds, until the rising chorus of horns behind forced him to let in the clutch.