Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  * * *

  It wasn’t until after midnight that James won his release and made his way quite shakily upstairs to bed. The women had long since retired. The upper floor of the house was dark and silent. He crept to the spare room and climbed into bed, thankful for his freedom. Five minutes after he had turned off the light and was beginning to drift into unconsciousness there was a scratching at the door like the sound of a mouse in the wainscot. Dimly he was aware of the door opening and a shadow slipping into the room. For a dreadful moment—in silhouette their figures were not dissimilar—he thought it might be Mrs. Pike. It was only when the shadow whispered, “James, are you awake?” that he recognized Ellie.

  He felt her climbing onto the bed, pushing his feet aside. He scrabbled for the bedside light and when finally he found the switch, there she was, cross-legged, at the foot of the bed, elf-like, wearing a long cotton T-shirt and apparently nothing else. His eyes went up and down her figure, and hesitated where matters were most difficult, where the hem of the T-shirt was stretched tight from thigh to thigh and there was a dark triangle of shadow. Possibilities crowded in on him. Lis, he thought, remembering moments during the play. She could do that trick, the actor’s trick, of assuming personalities at will.

  “So how was cross-examination by my beloved father?”

  “I think I passed.”

  She considered him thoughtfully. It was disturbing to see vague and uncertain reflections of her father in her face, almost as though he was a hideous caricature of his daughter. “I think he likes you. He likes scientists. They make good witnesses, that’s what he always says.”

  “And he asked if we were sleeping together.”

  She sighed. “How very forensic of him. What did you reply?”

  “I told him the truth, that Kevin gets in the way.”

  That seemed to silence her. She looked down, picking distractedly at the duvet. Finally she raised her eyes and looked at him. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I haven’t told you all about Kevin. Not really. I think I should.”

  “Not if it’s going to make me jealous.”

  “Envious,” she corrected sharply. “You’re jealous of what you already possess, envious of what someone else has.”

  “And Kevin has you?”

  She pouted. It was a good pout, with a strong French accent. He could imagine her in Paris, throwing rocks at French policemen and pouting.

  “Kevin and I were engaged, you see. I haven’t told you this, have I? I mean really engaged, a notice in The Times and the Telegraph, the church booked—yes, church, for God’s sake. Nuptial mass. The order sheets had gone to the printers. Reception at his college. It was all planned.”

  “I’ll bet your mother loved the idea.”

  “She did as a matter of fact. But it all fell apart. Differences, I suppose. Of character, of ideas. It was all a bit traumatic. Anyway, we decided at the last minute to call the whole thing off. Except it isn’t, really…”

  “Isn’t over?”

  “I went up to London last weekend.”

  “To see him?”

  She looked miserable. Maybe, he thought with astonishment, she was about to cry. “We did it,” she admitted quietly. “You know what I mean. We’d broken up and the idea was to meet up for lunch like old friends, to wish him all the best with his new job…and it sort of happened. In the afternoon. In his new flat that he shares with a couple of other guys. And there we were, shagging in his bedroom while they were watching football in the sitting room.” There was silence. They sat at either end of the bed watching each other and experiencing all the agonies of behavior in a time of transition, when love was meant to be free but actually was merely denominated in a new kind of currency. What did she owe the wretched Kevin? What, if anything, did she owe James? And what did she keep in the bank for a rainy day? She turned her attention back to picking at the quilt. “Don’t you mind?”

  “Not yet.”

  A wry smile. She crawled up the bed to kneel beside him and plant an artless kiss on his cheek. “You’re very sweet, you know that? And funny.”

  “Funny’ll do, but I’m not sure I want to be sweet.”

  There was something infinitely appealing about her face just a few inches from his, mouth part open, as delicate as a flower. He bent forward and touched his lips against hers. This was about to be, he felt sure, the moment—of truth, of consummation, of catharsis, of something. He wasn’t quite sure of the words. There was that familiar presence of her against him that he recognized from the play, when he, Fando, had had to carry her, the crippled Lis, on the road to Tar. He knew the angle of her bones, the roundness of her joints, the flesh and the sinew. And the smell of her, an amalgam of things that included soap and shampoo, but other, nameless scents as well. His hand went downwards, beneath the T-shirt and down the front of the underpants he discovered there, the sort of groping he knew, back row of the stalls stuff, that he had done with one or two other girls. Then she twisted away.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. It’s just, I don’t want that now. I’m sorry, but I don’t.” She slipped off the bed. “It’s not you, James, it’s all sorts of stuff. Kevin, of course. But other things as well. The parents, everything.”

  “Everything?”

  At the door she paused, looking back with a bright and positive expression. “Tomorrow we set off,” she said. “How’s that for exciting?”

  And then she slipped out into the darkness of the upstairs landing and the door closed behind her.

  II

  4

  Sam leaves the bed, crosses over to the window and draws back the curtains.

  How does one end up here, he wonders, in this wooden-beamed room with its painted ceiling and arched windows and, beneath the floorboards, the soft tick of some beetle that will ultimately destroy everything? Of course he can provide a literal answer to all that—languages in the sixth form at school and then that Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his National Service, which gave a callow youth a taste for things Russian that he could never shake off. University followed as a matter of course, with an upper second in Slavonic languages and the foreign service examination in which his academic weaknesses were easily outshone by his sharp, clipped mind and ability to synthesize an argument from a plenitude of facts. And his knack for thinking on his feet. And the fact that he could actually speak Russian pretty well, where all the others could conjugate and decline and analyze and parse but they couldn’t actually feel it in the way he did. But none of that is quite what he means as he stands there looking out on the squat fifteenth-century towers, the gray bridge decked out with statues, the river that everyone knows from Smetana’s musical homage, Vltava.

  Vltava; Moldau.

  As always, a German name stands like a gothic shadow behind the Czech—Praha, Prag; Malá Strana, Die Kleinseite; Vltava, Moldau—just as German history looms behind Czech history, occasionally reaching forward to tap it on the shoulder and remind the Czechs that they only occupy a narrow Slavic salient thrust into the heart of the Teutonic world.

  “What’s the time?”

  He glances at his watch, then back at the bed. “Six o’clock.”

  Stephanie regards him through a blur of sleep. Her small face has the precise features of fine porcelain. Pretty. “I’d better get a move on.”

  “You haven’t got a train to catch.”

  “Still.” She gets out of bed on the far side, with her back to him so that she preserves her modesty as much as possible. She dislikes being seen naked. Her slender figure flashes white across the room, seeking the sanctuary of the bathroom. When she emerges, three-quarters of an hour later, her public persona is in place—a faint blush of makeup, hair hitched back and gathered in a chignon, her crisp white blouse buttoned to her neck, her navy skirt as perfectly pleated as her mind. They have breakfast, barely speaking. It seems like the awkward silence of a funeral, mourning the loss of somethi
ng permanent, whereas all they are doing is anticipating a temporary separation.

  “You could have gone by air.”

  “You’ve already said that a dozen times.”

  “It’s just—”

  “I know what it’s just. It’s just that there’s no way I would have left Ringo behind.”

  “Or waited so that I could come with you.”

  “You know I couldn’t do that.”

  * * *

  After breakfast he carries her bags out to the car and they stand together dejectedly, looking at her Volkswagen parked in the small square outside the building. As she has teasingly told him many times, the VW, purchased duty-free when she first came out eighteen months ago, is her real love. The name Ringo is discreetly painted on the bonnet. Ringo is Steffie’s favorite Beatle, although God knows why, because he is, as Sam has remarked, an ugly bugger. “I like ugly buggers,” she replied.

  “So where does that leave me?”

  Stephanie turns to face him. She is disturbingly lovely like that, standing there in her navy skirt and sky-blue linen jacket. White boots. A little black beret. The very antithesis of the Slav looks one sees in the girls around the city. They have strong bone structure and wide cheeks, but Steffie’s look is that of a Dresden shepherdess, her precise features composed into what she does best—an ironic little smile. Aren’t I pretty? it seems to ask. And, isn’t it all a bit of a sham? “We’ve talked it over a million times, haven’t we?” she reminds him. “We know what we’re doing. Giving it a rest for a bit. Trying to get some kind of perspective on the whole thing.”

  “You know what perspective has? A vanishing point.”

  “But that’s where parallel lines meet up. So who’s to say?”

  “You mustn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Leave questions hanging.”

  She composes her smile into a little pout. “Who cares?” Then glances at her watch. “Look at the time. It’ll take me hours to get to Jenny and Jeremy’s. I must go.”

  “Be careful.”

  “You know very well I’m as tough as nails, and so’s Ringo. By this afternoon we’ll be with Jen in her cozy little married quarters in Munching Gladbark or whatever it’s called. Anyway, it’s you who must be careful.”

  “Me?”

  “Of Eric’s wife.” Eric is Head of Chancery. His wife is French, acquired during a posting to Paris a decade earlier. There was some story about his having prized her away from her first husband, who was a fonctionnaire at the Quai d’Orsay. The affair created something of a diplomatic incident, but in general everything worked in Eric’s favor—in the corridors of the Foreign Office it was considered quite a triumph to have one of ours steal a Frenchwoman from her husband while playing away from home. Like winning a test match in Australia.

  “Madeleine? She likes bigger prey. An ambassador here, a minister there, perhaps a film director, perhaps a writer.”

  “She also likes little snacks now and again. She’ll try to get you into bed as soon as my back is turned, you just wait and see. We women can tell these things. You poor men are little more than grazing gazelles when the female hyena is on the prowl.” It might have been rabbits and vixens, but Steffie always likes to emphasize her African background—Zambia when it was still called Northern Rhodesia, where her father was something to do with copper.

  “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

  “As long as you don’t mix your affections.”

  “You don’t show affection for Madeleine. You might feel lust towards her, or loathing, or perhaps even love, but nothing so dangerous as affection.”

  “Oh, shut up.” She raises herself up on her toes and puts her hands on his shoulders to kiss him. He catches her scent, the perfume she always wears, the one that he claims ought to be banned for indecency, for its name alone, never mind its smell: Youth Dew. Her kiss is hesitant, as though each time were the first and she isn’t quite sure how to do it. He puts his arms round her and feels her narrow fragility. “I’ll miss you,” he tells her.

  She laughs. “I’ll fly out and see you once things are settled at home. And remember my warning. Beware the hyena.”

  Another tentative kiss and she climbs into the car, allowing him a glimpse of stocking-top and narrow, white thigh before she adjusts her skirt and slams the door. The vehicle starts with that familiar clattering that is more like a washing machine than a motor car, and then she is gone, the particular, personal fact of being Stephanie in her Beetle called Ringo translated into an anonymous Volkswagen stuttering out of the square, turning the corner and out of sight.

  * * *

  Once she has gone, Sam goes to his own car and drives across the river. He feels a bit disconsolate but also strangely liberated. On his own again. He wonders whether it is true about Madeleine Whittaker, but more immediately there is the question of whether he will be late for his appointment, and if he is, will the man wait? On balance, probably yes. An opportunity to talk to a First Secretary (Chancery) from the British embassy is not the kind of thing one turns down these days. Everyone is trying to get hold of an audience willing to listen to declarations, manifestos, opinions, promises, threats, hopes, all those things that go to make up the startling political life of the country at the moment. A little while ago the place was the usual depressed Soviet satellite, the kind of post that people at the Foreign Office would rather risk malaria in West Africa to avoid. But now everyone wants a tour of duty basking in the sun of Dubček’s socialism with a human face.

  He drives along Resslova, through the sparse scattering of vehicles that passes for traffic in the city. Eric Whittaker always explains it as Soviet equality made manifest: cheap beer and trams for the masses; champanski and Tatra automobiles for the nomenklatura. The result is wide boulevards with barely a car in sight, and the guilty pleasure of exclusivity.

  * * *

  The meeting is in the New Town, in a café full of the noise of talk and the smoke of cheap cigarettes, with Marta Kubišová’s earthy voice over the speakers, belting out her version of “Walking Back to Happiness.” He stands on the edge of the crowd and watches for a while, trying to ignore the music and follow what is being discussed. The talk is all politics—not the comatose politics of the last two decades but the new, anxious, outrageous politics of the present. It’s like a new religion, a new creed that people believe might achieve some kind of earthly paradise. Passion lives in uneasy alliance with logic, neither emotion familiar in the political discourse of the country until the last few months. Appropriately enough, the man conducting the meeting, the man he has come to see, has the look of a prophet about him, the pinched features of an ascetic, the gaze of a visionary. Sam is reminded of Tom Courtenay playing the scar-faced Strelnikov in the film of Doctor Zhivago: a starveling face and the staring eyes of a messiah. But this particular man’s name isn’t Tom, it’s a distinctive Zdeněk; and his wife—brittle, energetic—is Jitka.

  After the meeting breaks up—there are questions, statements, arguments, laughter, groans and catcalls—he comes over to Sam and grabs his hand with surprising strength. “We bring freedom to Czechoslovak people,” he announces. “Freedom will be compulsory.”

  “That’s a good line.”

  Jitka glosses her man’s English with a quiet urgency: “He means, not the freedom of Dubček’s party, not communist freedom given out like sweets to children. But real freedom, of heart and soul.”

  Zdeněk speaks quickly to her in Czech, so fast and colloquial that Sam only gathers the odd word. Amongst which americký and kapitál. “And not American freedom either,” Jitka explains. “We will not be slaves to capital any more than we will be slaves to Marxism. We are ready to forge a new instrument. We are, you see, the children of communism. We were born in the socialist state and that is all we have known, and now we are demanding something different.”

  People have gathered round, listening to what is being said, eager to put their point of view. Word has
got out that Sam is from the embassy. “When will the Americans help us?” someone asks.

  “We don’t want Americans,” another interrupts. “Americans are bad as Russians. We want our own future.”

  “You come to our public meeting tomorrow,” says the Strelnikov character, leaning forward and speaking urgently into Sam’s face. “Can you do that? Can you?” Once again he takes hold of Sam’s hand to emphasize his point, the urgency of it.

  “Of course I can. Just tell me where.”

  * * *

  Driving back through the Old Town, Sam is reminded of the protesting students back home. He saw them on a visit to his mother in Oxford a few months ago. They were occupying the Clarendon building, playing politics as though it were a parlor game dreamed up for a bit of entertainment. Deanz Meanz Feinz had been chalked on the walls of Balliol, alongside Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho. The Czech students might look no different from the Oxford ones—the same worn T-shirts and bomber jackets, the same faded jeans, the same unkempt hair, the boys barely differentiated from the girls—but this lot aren’t playing a game. At work he sees the intelligence briefings. He knows of the thousands of Russian troops within the Czechoslovak borders, still there after military exercises in the spring; and he knows of the hundreds of thousands more waiting just outside the borders in neighboring, fraternal, East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Soldiers and tanks, the full panoply of the Warsaw Pact poised to crush one of its own member states. Unlike British students, Czech students won’t be able to run home to Mummy and Daddy if that particular axe falls.

  * * *

  That afternoon he tries to phone Steffie’s friends in Germany to see if she has arrived, but he can’t get through. “You can book a call,” the operator informs him. “It will take five hours.”