‘Is that surprising?’
‘The look on your face suggested that it went deeper than being a tourist without the guidebook.’
‘Prague on a Shoestring is very helpful.’
He made her stand up and moved very close. ‘Would you rather I said it’s because you’re beautiful?’
She would have done. Much rather. ‘You forgot to add… and irresistible.’
Tomas laughed. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong.’
She drew in a breath and decided. ‘I could help out now if you wanted.’
He looked at her. ‘I do want.’
There was a marked inflection on the ‘want’.
Time to go inside: and Laure made herself as comfortable as possible on the bench for the performance of Don Giovanni.
The curtains were tugged back. A single marionette in a black cap and Pierrot costume lay crumpled on the dim, almost dark, stage. Only his outstretched hands had any light on them. Unusually, his puppet master stood directly behind him.
It was black-clad Lucia, her strong features blurred into the shadows.
From backstage sifted the high, sweet notes of a violin playing a lament. Very slowly, Pierrot reached up a hand, then a second. He unbent his knee, then the other and stood upright. Laure recognized the Prince marionette without the kerchief and red-checked shirt. Under this light, the mouth was accentuated and had become tragic and the features had shed their merriment.
He experimented with walking. Up and down. Up and down – a universe of bewilderment, anxiety and grief enshrined in the trembling figure. Then he turned, faced the audience, and placed his hand over his heart and left it there.
He was alive, she thought.
His hand fell to his side, and he appeared to stare straight at Laure. Come with me.
Laure sighed – and the Pierrot flowed through her.
He was leading the watchers over a boundary… between the real and the make-believe, between the inert and what lived, to the point where logic was abandoned and the illusion held sway.
The marionette looked up at its master. The master – Lucia – looked down at the marionette. Marionette and master gazed deep into each other’s eyes.
Who controls whom?
The music yearned and made her ache.
What can I live for?
Very deliberately, the puppet lifted his wooden hand, took hold of the string attached to his leg and, as he fixed his gaze on the puppet master, pulled the string up and down. His leg obeyed him.
He shook his head. Disbelief? Rejection?
Laure was gripping her hands so tightly that her nails dug into her flesh.
The high, violin note was held. The marionette reached up and jerked the string that controlled his leg out of its mooring, disabling it. In front of the audience, he crumpled slowly, a figure of pain. A wooden hand trembled as, again, he reached up and detached his second leg. Then one of his arms. Mutilated, shaking, he looked around at the audience.
No. She bit her lip to bite down on the involuntary cry.
With his remaining arm, the marionette pulled the string that held him to life, dismantled his own head and fell forward.
He was now a heap of marionette bones on the stage.
The entire thing only took a couple of minutes and the curtains were whisked shut. The suicide of a marionette? The defeat of a puppet master?
She felt sick. She felt terrified. She felt she had seen nothing so exquisite, so clever. So brutal. Or, so haunting.
Laure looked around. No one applauded. Some in the audience rearranged themselves on the bench, others talked to their companions. She wanted to shout out: but you have just seen genius.
Then she understood that the condition of watching what they had just seen was silence and those around were versed in subversion.
‘Are you OK?’
Tomas slid towards her on the bench. In answer, she held out both hands which were trembling with aftershock. He took them, held them and stilled their movement. After a few moments, he bent over and kissed them.
The curtains were parted and the overture to Don Giovanni struck up.
The following day, Laure knocked on the door of the dining room where Eva and Petr were eating supper and told them she accepted their offer to stay on in Prague.
‘Are you sure?’ Eva gave one of her disturbing laughs.
‘Yes, I have arranged for my mother to send over books from the reading list which will help me prepare for next year.’
Petr presided over this exchange. She couldn’t be sure but she thought she detected a hint of satisfaction in the dark eyes when she told them of her plans to work at the marionette theatre two nights a week. ‘If that’s OK with you,’ she added hastily.
Petr’s reply left a margin of doubt. ‘I strongly recommend that you do no such thing.’
He didn’t wish her to but, equally, he wasn’t going to stop her – which he could do. Why? Perhaps he really wanted her to work at the theatre so he could question her about what went on?
She reckoned she was becoming a good pupil, a fast learner in the ‘language’ of this country.
A drained-looking Eva pushed aside her plate. ‘You must know that you can’t count on us if there’s trouble.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll say goodnight.’
Laure made to clear the dishes but Petr indicated that she should take Eva’s vacated chair. Petr propped his elbows onto the table and began to talk about the children, the weather, sights he had seen in Paris. Anything but Laure’s involvement with the marionette theatre.
The sky darkened and a group of pigeons patrolled the roof top outside the window. Petr lit a cigarette. A welcome coolness slid into the room.
Laure relaxed. Here she was again – inadvertently – trying on for size what it was to be a woman of a house. It was rather fun to contemplate and utter nonsense. Petr smoked quietly, every so often glancing at her from under his lids. ‘Did you know my favourite English book is Winnie-the-Pooh? It appeals to us Czechs because it so absurd. And funny. We understand the combination. And, it’s easier to get hold of than most publications.’
‘It must be so awful,’ she said without thinking. ‘To not be able to read what you wish.’
Petr shot a look at the ceiling as if he expected the cornicing to be bugged. ‘What’s yours?’ He got to his feet, took a slice of bread from the bread basket on the table and went over to the window.
Laure considered the flippant answer: anything with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. ‘Not sure.’
He beckoned to Laure. ‘Do you want to feed the pigeons? Eva doesn’t like me doing it as she thinks they’re pests. Which they are. But nice pests.’ He tore a piece off the slice, balanced it on his palm and held it out. She pitched it towards the bird and it missed, rolling down the roof to the gutter.
‘You’re no good,’ said Petr teasingly. He threw a second fragment. This time the pigeon pounced while his smaller companion fluttered his wings in protest. ‘Mine, I think,’ said Laure and lobbed a bread pellet towards it. A yellow beak jabbed down.
‘One all,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Right. You’re on.’
They stood companionably at the window throwing bread pellets at the pigeons who couldn’t believe their luck. Two to Petr. Three to Laure championing the smaller pigeon which had a slight pink tinge to its wings. ‘His missus,’ she said. ‘Her name is Tina Turner.’
‘Mine’s Karl Marx,’ said Petr.
‘My culture versus yours.’
‘If you like.’ He turned a smiling countenance on Laure.
‘Did you notice something?’ He shook his head. ‘They’re both as greedy as each other,’ she said.
Petr laughed. After a moment, Laure joined in.
With a flap of wings, the satiated pigeons took to the wing. Laure and Petr remained at the window, looking down at the darkening city with the cooler air flowing over their faces.
‘See the buildings?’ He gestured to the roofs, dome
s and spires that punctuated the cityscape. ‘Some were palaces, some were the town houses of the aristos. Some belonged to rich merchants.’
‘But no longer?’
‘Yes, all that has gone.’ After a moment, he added, ‘I know that you reckon I’m living the privileged life no longer possible for those out there.’
Did she have the nerve to ask: how come you live in this beautiful, requisitioned place? She didn’t and remained quiet. It didn’t matter because she was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. She squinted up at him. She was pretty sure, too, that he would have asked himself the same questions.
‘It’s very nice of you to keep me company,’ he said at last. ‘You remind me of…’ He stopped himself.
Laure felt it was only polite to ask, ‘Of?’
‘Of myself,’ said Petr. ‘A long time ago.’
CHAPTER 13
SHE MADE IT HER BUSINESS TO GET TO KNOW THE BUILDING that housed the marionette theatre. Although it was well proportioned with many windows, it also had dark corners and shadows. Dirt filmed most surfaces and edged window frames and cornicing. Most of the rooms were empty of furniture. In some of them there were mattresses and sleeping bags that smelt of unaired clothes, sex and spilt booze. Backstage, there was a warren of rooms, including the one that did double duty as a kitchen and green room. The passage that led to it from the auditorium was lined with cracked mirroring, which had the effect of fragmenting the reflections in it.
If you come, said Tomas, you will never say anything of what goes on in here. That’s the promise you make to us.
The second floor was used by Anatomie to store their instruments – two guitars, drum kit, keyboard and a precious amplifier. ‘It’s treated like a new-born baby,’ said Milos, ‘because it’s impossible to replace.’
Which one was Tomas’s guitar? She longed to touch it but continued up to the attics, placing her feet in the depressions worn into the staircase. At one point, she put out her hand to steady herself on the wall. It was warm and slightly moist and she had an odd notion that she was being sucked back into time.
With few hitches – or, so it appeared – Laure was absorbed into the life of the company. Wearing the uniform of black jeans and a black T-shirt, she made her evening pilgrimage twice a week to the Old Town Square and brewed tea, cleaned and ushered.
As Tomas predicted, Lucia made it her business to address as few words as possible to Laure, but Milos had appointed himself her tutor, a role that pleased him. ‘I’m not allowed to travel,’ he said, ‘so you must tell me about things and places.’ Missing a couple of upper front teeth, he had a habit of clamping his top lip over his bottom lip to hide the gaps, which made Laure ashamed of possessing such good ones.
On one occasion, she arrived early to discover a meeting was being held in the auditorium. A man guarding the entrance prevented her from entering. He flapped his hand in the direction of backstage. The double doors were open a crack and she glimpsed a black-clad group of twenty or so, smoking furiously and clustered around a figure typing out a document.
Obediently, she went backstage and did not refer to what she had seen. By the time of the performance, the meeting had dispersed.
Tomas kept his distance.
Would he or would he not seek her out? She had a dreadful presentiment that he had been playing with her or, worse, he had forgotten about her and she felt, insanely, irrationally, jealous of the people around him. Yet, when he turned up one evening and told her to fetch her bag because he was taking her out to dinner, she was irritated by his high-handedness.
He sensed it. ‘Forgive me, Laure?’
She answered a little stiffly. ‘Nothing to forgive.’
He put his hand on her shoulder – and her flesh burned. ‘I’ve been with Leo. He’s had a bit of crisis. A woman.’
They headed for a place he knew in the Malá Strana and, as they crossed the Charles Bridge, he said, ‘You’ve not really explored the city, I think.’ She shook her head. He pointed to a statue. ‘St John of Nepomuk. He was a… what’s the word? A martyr. He was thrown into the river because he refused to give up his beliefs. People touch him for luck.’
The restaurant was so modest that it scarcely merited the term, being a small room at the back of a shop that sold leather goods. But it opened onto a small back garden where tables had been set out covered in brown paper peppered with stains from previous diners.
Tomas regarded the glass of beer placed in front of him. ‘I don’t know how to say this but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay your half.’ He raised rueful eyes to hers. ‘I wish it was not the case but a musician like me is not allowed to earn much money.’
The confession, and the humiliation of it, sent an arrow into her heart. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does. We are considered decadent and the State makes sure we don’t earn much. But, if I was a miner, it would be different, even though as a miner you might not be that productive. But don’t worry or pity us. We know how to handle it.’
He was watching her carefully.
She leant forward and asked in a low voice, ‘Is it safe to talk like that here?’
He did his trick of raising an eyebrow. ‘Why do you think we’re eating outside?’
She ducked her head. ‘I’m ashamed of my ignorance.’
‘Don’t be.’
His voice contained a caress. She was finding it difficult to breath normally and, to keep herself on the straight and narrow, she dug a fingernail into the soft part of her thumb.
‘After turbulent times, Czechoslovakia is now living through normalizáce, which…’ Tomas heaved a sigh, ‘is not as nice as it sounds.’
She thought of how little she knew and should hurry up and get to know.
‘See the waiter,’ Tomas said.
Obediently, she glanced across the warm, shadowed garden to a stooped and elderly man doling out food onto plates.
‘Once upon a time, he was a respected and successful head of a secondary school. Then he made a mistake.’ Laure widened her eyes. ‘He was accused of giving the eulogy at the funeral of a known dissident. Immediately, his contract was terminated, and…’ Tomas snapped his fingers. ‘He was unemployable and that’s his condition for life. Result, he ekes out a living here. If any of the authorities come, he hides in the kitchen.’
Laure wondered if Tomas should be telling her so much, so soon in their acquaintanceship.
Their soup was placed in front of them and Tomas picked up his spoon. ‘The debate has to be: is he lucky?’ He used the edge of his paper tablecloth to flick away the fly making tracks for his bowl.
She tried to think through the implications but she knew she was losing the capacity for clear thought. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Is he?’
‘In the old days, he would have been thrown into the Bartolomĕjská, and beaten up, possibly killed. These days, the approach is subtler and there is nothing to be done. He will never have a better life. It’s impossible.’
‘But he must appeal,’ she whispered. ‘Surely.’
‘Here what is written by the authorities is the truth, even if it everyone knows it is erroneous, including the authorities.’
Laure couldn’t eat much of the soup. Putting down her spoon, she stole a look around the tiny garden, which had filled up with diners. After he had finished his, Tomas reached for her half-emptied bowl. ‘Can I?’
‘You can,’ she said naughtily, ‘but also you may.’ She wasn’t sure he appreciated the linguistic semantics. No matter.
Without looking up, Tomas said, ‘We’re being watched. If he comes over, let me do the talking.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It happens.’ Tomas was matter-of-fact. ‘Often.’
The stew that appeared was much better and Laure enjoyed it. ‘Am I tasting juniper berries?’
Before Tomas could answer, a man approached and stood over them. He was elderly but fresh-faced enough, and quiet-looking. He was dressed almost ent
irely in grey. It occurred to Laure that grey was particularly useful, not only for camouflage but, in a country where basics were apparently difficult, it was easier to disguise when not spanking clean.
He said something in Czech and Laure recognized the words ‘Tomas’ and ‘Anatomie’. Tomas looked up from his plate. ‘Can we talk in English for the sake of my companion here?’
Without missing a beat, the man switched into accented English. ‘You are Tomas from Anatomie.’ Tomas nodded his head and the man turned to Laure. ‘And you must be?’
Tomas introduced Laure and mentioned she was employed by the Kobes. The stranger did no more than glance at Laure but she got the impression that he had absorbed every detail.
‘You’re very good,’ he was saying. ‘In fact, I’ve tried to buy your recordings but they are impossible to get hold of.’
Laure found the accented English extremely sinister.
Tomas sent him what Laure recognized as his professional charming smile, designed to render its target immobile. ‘You would be very clever if you did as shops are banned from selling then.’
‘That’s a shame.’ Without fuss, the man sat down. ‘I’m Major Hasík.’
The elderly waiter had disappeared, and a space had formed around their table.
‘Are you working on some new songs? Apparently, one or two have been performed in France. Am I correct? I’m told and, I may be wrong, that a couple of the lyrics poked fun at this country.’
‘Really?’ said Tomas.
‘Really,’ said Major Hasík. ‘And perhaps not such a good idea?’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I gather you like to get out to the countryside. A healthy thing to do. Do you go mushroom hunting? Where I go the woods have been picked clean. I am always anxious to know where there’s a good supply.’ He searched in his pocket, produced a card and laid it on the table. ‘Do please phone me if you ever come across any. It would be so good to know.’
Tomas barely glanced at it. ‘Where I live, the phone has been cut off.’
‘Shouldn’t you get it mended?’
‘I’m told it can’t be mended.’
Major Hasík stood upright. ‘How odd. Why don’t you get in touch and I’ll see what can be done?’ His smile was pleasant and helpful. ‘I’m afraid people in this country don’t want to work, so they tell you that things can’t be fixed. I know someone in communications who can help.’
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 15