Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  5

  The meeting next day was in a deconsecrated church in the New Town. It was part of Sam’s job to attend as many meetings like this as he could, and since the first student protests the previous year he had got to know many of the leaders. Stephanie used to come with him whenever she was free—somehow she made his presence less obvious, although he never tried to conceal what he was doing there. “I’m at the British embassy,” he’d say if asked. “I’m not a spy or anything. Just interested in what’s going on.”

  This time the group was new, the Strelnikov character was new, and who could say what might become of it or him? The meeting was all to do with forming a new political movement. Svobodná strana or something; the Freedom Party.

  When she caught sight of Sam, Strelnikov’s wife, Jitka, raised her hand in acknowledgment. She was one of a little gaggle of activists milling around in the place where the high altar had once been, fixing microphones and speakers and arguing about where the chairs should go. He went over and said hello to her and the preoccupied Zdeněk, shook a few hands, exchanged a few words. They were students, mainly. One of the helpers turned and smiled at him. Blue eyes and Slav cheekbones and careless hair. Jeans and a leather jacket. A complexion that wasn’t flawless like Stephanie’s and features that weren’t as perfect. But strong. Face not quite beautiful. Hair not quite blonde. If features betray character, then these suggested strength and a certain amused indifference. They hovered on the edge of beauty without doing anything so obvious as stepping over the borderline. “Lenka Konečková,” she said, her eyes holding Sam’s at the same time as her hand grasped his. “I saw you at meeting before.” Good English, which was rare. “I remember you.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “You don’t see me. Of course not.”

  “I can’t think why I didn’t.”

  A wry smile. And that look, a communication that moved at the speed of light, that was light, nothing more, crossing the gap between them and carrying with it a message that needed no deciphering but made things happen inside him—a swelling, a weakness, a fluttering running through his viscera as though something had come loose. He hadn’t expected this, really he hadn’t.

  “Samuel Wareham. I’m from the British embassy.”

  “They told me. You speak good Czech. A bit Russified but good.”

  “Russian was my main language at university.”

  A beguiling laugh. “Tainted, then.”

  “I’m trying to purge it. Look…” Sam hesitated, looking round, trying to work out if there was anyone else with particular claims on this girl—what was her name? Lenka?—but it seemed she was on her own. He thought of Stephanie somewhere in West Germany, chatting happily to Jenny—her old school chum—about life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, about Prague and her job, and, presumably, about Sam. Saying what? That they were sort of engaged. An understanding, really. Imagine being a dip’s wife! But the relationship wasn’t always easy…“Do you want to come for a drink when you’re finished here? So we can have a chat. In Czech.”

  She shrugged. “And I can tell you how you go wrong? Sure.”

  And then the rest of the meeting, the voting, the passing of motions, the arguing and the applauding, and all the time the girl called Lenka sitting on the other side of the nave from him, taking notes some of the time but also glancing across at him. The occasional conjunction of eyes. The suggestion of a smile. At the end of the speeches a young girl mounted the rostrum, carrying a guitar. People applauded as this approximate Joan Baez lookalike stood there in the crossing of the ex-church, looking faintly diffident, slightly disheveled, watching the audience with something like embarrassment. “We’ve even got an anthem,” she announced into the microphone. Lenka glanced across at Sam with a deprecating smile while the singer fiddled with a capo and then struck the first chord. It was all predictable enough: “We Shall Overcome,” sung without the evangelical fervor that seemed to characterize it in the West but with something that only central Europe could manage—a kind of bitter irony. We shall overcome someday, perhaps, but surely not now. No one sang along but at the end, everyone clapped. And standing there beneath the dome of the deconsecrated church, Lenka Konečková looked directly across at Sam and smiled. As though there was a joke to be shared.

  He smiled back, wondering about Stephanie beetling around the German countryside in her Beetle. What would she think of the look that Lenka Konečková was even now directing back across the church at him, a blend of amusement and curiosity that brought with it disturbing possibilities? Surely this encounter was entirely innocent; but innocence could so easily spill over into guilt.

  * * *

  After the meeting they went to a well-known pivnice a few streets away where, it was said, Bohumil Hrabal would come in for a glass of Pilsner most days. “They say that about every pub in the city,” was Sam’s view. “He’d be pissed as a newt if it were true.”

  Pissed as a newt. Lenka laughed at his attempts to provide a translation. They found an unoccupied alcove where they could talk. Beer came. They drank a bit, looking at one another all the time, finding out how things were as much by glance and manner as by words. Lenka was at the university, doing a master’s degree in English. Why English? That shrug. Because it’s not Russian. He laughed. And she did some writing for one of the literary journals that had sprung up like mushrooms feeding on the rich humus of free speech. And the occasional piece for Czechoslovak radio. She was twenty-five years old, which made Sam feel almost fatherly; but she knew things far beyond her two and a half decades, he could see that. The conversation soon veered away from the personal to politics. Politics were on everyone’s lips, how things had changed since censorship was abandoned and where things might go next. What would happen when Dubček and his supporters confronted Brezhnev and the rest of the Soviet Politburo. “So what does Mr. Samuel think will take place?” Lenka asked. “All we want is to continue with free expression. Freedom to say what the hell we please and do what the hell we please. Will they let us?”

  “Depends what you say and what you do.”

  “We don’t know in advance. That’s what makes it so exciting.”

  Sam considered the matter carefully, as though he had been asked it by the Head of Chancery. “The Party has made its decision, hasn’t it? Abandoning censorship was the point of no return.”

  “They could try to bring it back.”

  “Difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.”

  “Maybe the Russians will force them?”

  “I don’t think the Soviet Politburo really knows what to do at the moment. They’ve got troops left here since the spring maneuvers and they don’t know whether to withdraw them or not. There are various currents within the Kremlin itself, although Brezhnev himself is a hawk and he’s the one who really matters. But there are other issues to consider, like the other Warsaw Pact countries, the fraternal allies. Romania, for example. What will Ceaușescu’s position be? And Hungary’s? Kádár needs to be brought on board. I imagine a lot of his sympathies are with Dubček. So any final decision is balanced on a knife-edge. But of course the main players are the Russians.”

  Lenka laughed, running fingers through her hair. “You know what I think? I think, fuck Russians. And fuck the fraternal allies.” That frank wide-open gaze. He had that feeling again, clotted at the base of his throat, like a sudden growth.

  “What about lunch,” he suggested, not wanting this encounter to die. “I must get back to the office now but what about tomorrow? Let me buy you lunch tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting at the foreign ministry in the morning. And then…”

  She took a moment to consider, as though assessing him and the implications of his invitation. When she answered, her tone seemed almost indifferent. “Why not?”

  Masaryk

  The Černín Palace guards its secrets as assiduously as a bank guards its vaults. Home to the Czechoslovak ministry of foreign affairs, the building sits across the rid
ge of land outside the gates of Prague Castle, the Hrad, as though blocking the way from the Castle to the West and freedom. Not for nothing had it been the seat of the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia during the Nazi occupation. But the biggest secret of all, hidden within the walls of this monstrous, monotonous building, was the one that stood prominently in Sam’s mind whenever he had an appointment here. It concerned the fate of Jan Masaryk, son of the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, and it came down to the question: did he jump or was he pushed?

  By March 1948 Masaryk, who had spent the war in London with the Czechoslovak government in exile, was foreign minister of the Czechoslovak Republic. More than that, he was the only non-communist minister not to have resigned in protest at the communist power grab of February. He was also middle-aged (sixty-one), lonely (a divorcé), mentally fragile (bipolar disorder) and disillusioned (who wouldn’t be?). In the early morning of March 10 his body was found lying on the paving of an inner courtyard of the Černín Palace. He was wearing pajamas and lay forty-seven feet directly beneath the open bathroom window of his official apartment on the third floor.

  Did he jump or was he pushed?

  Two decades later, Sam Wareham walked over to the window of the anteroom and looked down on that selfsame courtyard. Bright sunlight dissected the space with sharp diagonals of shadow. Small ornamental trees. Basalt paving stones. Somewhere down there Jan Masaryk’s body had lain on that cold March morning.

  Did he jump or was he pushed?

  Outside the anteroom, in the corridors of the ministry through which Sam had been led by a uniformed flunky, was the kind of chaos one expects in a beehive threatened by a bear. People hurried from office to office clutching files. Phones rang the second the receiver was replaced. Meetings were scheduled and rescheduled, then broken off because something more important had just cropped up. Oblivious to all this, Sam stood at the window and wondered.

  Did he jump or was he pushed?

  The popular feeling was, of course, that Masaryk had been pushed. Such a tidy man, they said with bitter irony, he had even made sure to close the window behind him.

  That was the joke.

  On the other hand, a number of friends and most of his relatives refused to accept this idea. Appalled at the political situation of the country and the dilemma in which he found himself, they said, Jan Masaryk took the honorable way out. Even his sister believed this. Yet the question remained, unanswered when Sam Wareham waited for his meeting, unanswered now, unanswered presumably for as long as vital files locked away within the former KGB archives in Moscow remained hidden from public scrutiny (which could be forever): did he jump or was he pushed?

  Prague is famous for its defenestrations. The first was in 1419 when a Hussite mob broke into the New Town Hall and threw a baker’s dozen of burghers to their deaths; the second was two hundred years later, when two imperial officials and their secretary were tossed out of a window of the Hrad. The first led to the fifteen-year Hussite Wars, the second to the devastating Thirty Years’ War. Both were about religion. The third defenestration was that of the liberal, saddened, disillusioned minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk.

  What did his defenestration lead to?

  * * *

  The man Sam Wareham was to meet, a harassed and confused apparátník who had somehow kept his job throughout the upheavals of the last year, apologized for having kept him waiting. “We are, as you can see, at the eye of the storm.”

  Eyes of storms were, as far as Sam knew, places of great and sinister stillness, but there was no time to unpick mixed metaphors. Instead they could only deal with the matter in hand—an imminent visit to Prague by a British trade union group. There was this factory tour that had to be curtailed, that meeting which needed to be rescheduled.

  Sam nodded and noted. “I’ll let His Excellency know of the changes.”

  “You know how it is, Mr. Wareham, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.” Which wasn’t really true, but it was not too difficult to put himself in his opposite number’s place. After all, the Russian bear was right outside the hive. While all the little bees were panicking you could hear his heavy breathing. And yet…and yet at the end of the meeting he, Samuel Wareham, a First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, could walk out into the sunshine of Hradčaný and stroll down the road into Malá Strana with the thought of what the Russians might or might not do no more than a distant irritation. This city might be rendered drab by the dead hand of communism, but still it remained, quite simply, the most beautiful in Europe.

  His apartment was in a seventeenth-century building tucked in between the river and the great geological mass that supports the Castle. It was edged by cobbled alleys and faced on a square where, it was said, public executions were once held. He unlocked the outside door and went up to his apartment on the first floor. Only the week before, security had been round to sweep the place to see that it was safe, devoid of listening ears. “Clean as a whistle,” the man from security had said. “As far as we can see, at any rate. Difficult to get bugs through these old walls, so anything they manage to plant will be superficial, within the plaster, or behind pictures and in light fittings. That mirror, for example. Anyway, at the moment, zilch.”

  Zilch? Where had he got that from?

  Sam picked up the phone in the hallway and dialed through to the embassy. Dorothy answered his call, as impatient of his irregular habits as ever. “I’ve been trying to find you. Mr. Whittaker was asking where you were.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “That you were out chasing girls.”

  “That I was out at a meeting in the ministry.”

  “That you were out at a meeting in the ministry.”

  “And I’m afraid I’m still tied up.” He paused. “She’s very keen on bondage.”

  He could hear the outraged laughter in her voice as he put the phone down. But did Dorothy even know what bondage was? He tried for a moment to imagine her tied up and gagged, but failed. She, surely, would be doing the tying up, and the whipping. Glancing at his watch he went through into the sitting room. From the windows there was that view of the squat Gothic towers which had sat on the end of the bridge like warty toads for the last four hundred years. Heads had been stuck there during the Thirty Years’ War, a dozen Protestant heads like the victims of a Stalinist purge, perhaps Slansky and his associates in 1952. He put some music on—an obscure piece of Janáček that he had discovered—and sat at his desk to type a memorandum summarizing his meeting at the ministry. Three-quarters of an hour had passed before he glanced at his watch again. The damn thing would have to wait. He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, combed his hair and adjusted his tie. Five minutes late. He had offered to pick her up from home, but she’d demurred. “You’d never find it,” she said, which perhaps meant, “I don’t want you to find it.” He went out, closing the door carefully behind him and, as always, leaving a tiny scrap of fluff wedged in the jamb.

  * * *

  There was what passed as a crowd on the bridge—tourists from the neighboring countries, mainly. You heard German and Polish and occasionally the impossibly incomprehensible Magyar. Sometimes Russian. Almost never English, and when you did it was invariably strained through an American voice box.

  At one of the statues an imitation Dylan was strumming a guitar and singing Časy se Mění, “Times They Are a-Changin,” which was true enough in so many ways. Halfway along the bridge, at the statue of Saint John of Nepomuk, there she was, just as they had arranged.

  She was different, metamorphosed from the casual, slightly disheveled creature of their first encounter into a moth of various hues—a green, calf-length skirt, a navy blouse that was knotted beneath her bust and would have displayed her navel had she not been wearing a T-shirt underneath. Her face wore a touch of pale lipstick and a smudge of eyeshadow. Her hair was gathered up in a deliberately untid
y chignon. They shook hands and he caught a breath of perfume: floral, slightly cloying, and something underneath—her own scent. “Do I look all right?” she asked. “Lunch at Barrandov…?” As though she was unsure of what exactly was involved. He felt a sensation that he had not experienced for a long time, a pulse of anticipation and excitement just above his diaphragm. Somewhere in the further reaches of his brain a small alarm of warning went off.

  Talking about each other as you do when you are standing on the brink of intimacy, they walked to his car. She was sharp and blunt at one and the same time, asking probing questions but then driving the nail home with heavy blows: if you are a diplomat, why are you taking me to lunch? What’s in it for you? How is this in the interests of the British government?

  Sam laughed. “Even a diplomat can have a private life. Although sometimes he has to be careful.”

  “Careful? Why careful? Are you married?”

  “No, not married.”

  She turned to him almost accusingly. “But you think I am a spy?”

  “Actually, I don’t, but suspicion reigns high on Eastern European postings. Supping with the devil, you need a long spoon.” He wasn’t sure how to put it in Czech, but she seemed to understand, even made a joke about it. “Well, it’s lunch we’re going to now, isn’t it? Not supper. And I’m not the devil.” She looked at him knowingly as he held the car door open for her. “But I’m not an angel either.”

  * * *

  The restaurant was in the south of the city, perched on cliffs overlooking the river. There was an observation tower and projecting terraces like the bridges of a transatlantic liner. Below the terraces, in what might have been an old quarry, a swimming pool gleamed like turquoise set in tarnished silver. Splashes of laughter rose up to the diners. The tables were crowded with people from the film studios nearby—middle-aged men with loud voices, girls in short skirts and beehive hairdos, boys with longish hair and button-down shirts. Dark glasses were worn like a badge of office. The scene might have been in Hollywood, except there were no palm trees, no pink Cadillacs and a fraction of the money. Lenka tried not to gawp, but her eyes were alight with excitement as an obsequious waiter led the way to their table on the edge of the terrace. For almost the first time, she seemed her age, looking around and trying not to stare but spotting the stars nevertheless. “There’s Iva Janžurová. And Menzel, that’s Jiří Menzel.” There were other names that Sam didn’t recognize. Apparently Lenka was something of a film buff, and for a while that is what they talked about. What had Sam seen of Czech film? What did he like? What did he admire? Like and admire were two different things, weren’t they? She was insistent on the point. You could like something such as Ben Hur without admiring it. Or admire A Report on the Party and the Guests without liking it. It was all a matter of the critical faculty, wasn’t it?