Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  Ellie looks up at the Australian with complete indifference. “Don’t know yet. Toss of a coin.”

  “Toss of a coin? You serious?”

  “How we make all our decisions.”

  “Cool.”

  They sling their rucksacks and straighten up, feeling like two warriors setting off into battle.

  “Well, go on, then.” Declan’s tone is challenging. “Let’s see you toss your fucking coin.”

  “That,” Ellie says, “has to be done in private. At the moment of choice.” Her tone is prim, as though tossing a coin involves physical intimacy. With James following, she leads the way out of the hallway of the hostel into the gray morning. He’s feeling absurdly happy, warmed by her unexpected inclusion of him into her world. Coin-tossing has been elevated to a shared personal philosophy. Thus connected by tenuous bonds of familiarity and companionship, and the promised toss of a coin, Fando and Lis are still together.

  * * *

  The coin is finally spun at the roadside in the southern outskirts of the city, where signs point left to Remich and Saarbrücken and right to Thionville and Metz. It falls heads down, which means Germany and the Saarland. They walk to the left-hand fork, Ellie sticks out an arrogant little thumb and a car stops almost immediately. Spirits lift.

  IV

  15

  Sunday lunch with Lenka and her mother. He wondered why he had agreed to the idea and what the implications were behind it, but she had seemed so pleased that he had accepted the invitation. “She’ll understand,” Lenka insisted. “Someone from the British embassy whom I found at one of the meetings. She’ll be interested.” A knowing smile. “And she will like you, I think. Your šarm.“

  Perhaps it was that assurance that made the whole expedition all right. He was good at “sharm.”

  * * *

  Her mother lived in one of those concrete apartment blocks—paneláky—built on the outskirts of the city after the war, part of that halo of concrete that forms a hideous modern setting to the jewels of old Prague. Her allotted portion was a sixth-floor two-room flat with thin walls and the sound of the neighbors having a row next door. Her mother was a florid woman in her mid-forties who still showed hints of a beauty that her daughter had inherited. Kateřina Konečková was her name: “Katherine, possession of Koneček,” whoever Koneček might have been. She stained the tiny apartment with her presence, with the smell of cigarette smoke and a clinging and rosaceous perfume that she wore. When she shook Sam’s hand it was with caution, as though mere contact might be dangerous. “What are you then, a spy?” she asked, and to show it was a joke—which it wasn’t—she attempted a smile. Perhaps it was his ability with the language that made her suspicious. Foreigners didn’t speak Czech, not even bad Czech. They spoke Russian, maybe, or German.

  “I’ve told you all about Sam, Maminka.” Lenka’s tone was impatient. She was a child again, doting on her mother yet at the same time apprehensive, as though fearing what she might say or do and what impression she might make.

  “Not a spy,” Sam assured her. “I’m a diplomat.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “One tells lies and pretends they’re the truth; the other just tells lies.”

  The woman gave a bitter, rasping laugh. “Which is which?” She wasn’t what Sam had expected—there was more than mere shrewdness in her look, there was a sharp intelligence. “And you expect me to feed you, do you?”

  “We offered to take you out to lunch, Maminka.”

  “You know it’d be dangerous to be seen with a foreigner in public. Especially one from the British embassy.”

  Lenka sounded exasperated. “I keep telling you, Maminka, things are different these days. Things have changed.”

  Her mother snorted derisively. “You have no memory, that’s the trouble with the young.” She looked at Sam as though for confirmation, thus placing him squarely in the company of her generation. “They think they can do everything now. Freedom and love and all that rubbish. What will they be saying when the Russians invade, I wonder.”

  “They won’t, Maminka. Dubček will come to a compromise, you’ll see. We’ll give a bit and get on with things as we want.”

  “Dubček is no different from the others. He just smiles, that’s all. What does Mr. Diplomat think?”

  “Mr. Diplomat thinks it is time to prepare the lunch.”

  She laughed, a throaty, sarcastic sound. “Conciliation without answering the question,” she decided. “Typical of his kind.”

  In one corner of the living room was a kitchen area where they unloaded the bag they had brought. A large tin of shin of pork. Cabbage, potatoes. Two bottles of a Nuits Saint-Georges. Her mother watched with wonder as they stacked the things on the narrow shelf beside the cooker. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked. “Tuzex?”

  “We can get things through the embassy,” Sam said.

  “We?”

  “I can.” Sam was adept at sensing mood. Picking up vibrations, Stephanie would have said. He could sense vibrations from Lenka’s mother now—vibrations both good and bad. Jealousy and envy on the one side and the faint bat-squeak of curiosity on the other. The way she looked at him. What, he wondered, did she know about Lenka’s previous adventures? And where—because Lenka had said nothing about her father—where was Mr. Koneček?

  “So you are not an optimist?” he asked, once the pork was in the oven and they had opened one of the bottles of wine. “About what will happen to the country, I mean.”

  They were sitting on upright chairs round the narrow dining table. The older woman smoked and drank and considered him with something that resembled contempt. “I know what happens to idealists. People like Lenka. They are just as their parents were twenty years ago. Just like I was.”

  “You were?”

  “Oh, yes. Twenty years ago I believed. I was a Party member just like my husband. A true believer. When they arrested Milada Horáková I believed she was guilty. When she was on trial, I even signed a petition calling for her execution. When they executed her, I cheered.”

  He knew about Horáková, of course. You couldn’t read up about the country, as he had for the six months he was on the Czechoslovak desk in London, without knowing. Milada Horáková. One of the emblematic figures of twentieth-century Mitteleuropa, encompassing in her life all of the tragedies of that time and that place.

  “And then?”

  The woman looked at him with cold eyes. “And then they came for us.”

  Horáková

  It’s difficult to know where to begin with the story of Milada Horáková, but not difficult to know where to end: on a rope in the Pankrác prison in Prague on June 27, 1950, at five thirty-five in the morning. She was just forty-eight years old.

  How do you measure heroism? How do you describe it?

  Before the Second World War, in those distant, heady days of Czechoslovak liberal democracy, Horáková was a mother and a wife, a prominent member of the Czech Socialist Party, an active lawyer and a powerful advocate of women’s rights. After the Munich Agreement and the subsequent annexation of the Czech lands by Hitler’s Germany, she became a member of the Czech resistance. Along with her husband, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and eventually imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Later she was moved to various German prisons and eventually came to trial before a German court in Dresden. She was found guilty and condemned to death. This sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and she was moved to the women’s prison in Aichach in Bavaria, from where she was freed by American forces in 1945.

  Is that enough?

  The thing about Milada Horáková is that she never gave up. After her liberation she returned to Prague, to her husband, who had also survived imprisonment, and their daughter, who, in the absence of her parents, had been looked after by relatives. Immediately Horáková rejoined the Socialist Party and was elected to the Czech National Assembly. She argued, as she had always argued, for free
dom, for women’s rights, for decency.

  Once the Communist Party grabbed the reins of power in 1948, Horáková was forced to resign her seat in the national assembly. Nevertheless she refused to be silenced. An outspoken advocate for freedom and democracy, she remained a thorn in the side of the leadership. On September 27, 1949, she was arrested by the secret police once again, only this time it was the Communist StB (State Security) rather than the Gestapo. Along with a dozen other friends and associates she was subjected to the first of the communist regime’s show trials, facing the charge of being part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the new government. She was offered clemency if she signed a confession of guilt, but she refused. During the public trial, while the other accused read out confessions that had been prepared for them by the prosecution, Milada Horáková refused to admit any guilt and spoke out for the truth. She, along with three others, was condemned to death.

  Is that enough? The measurement of heroism is so difficult that sometimes we find ourselves gainsaying it. Even Milada Horáková herself wondered about what she had done, writing in the very last letter from prison to her daughter:

  one day, when you grow up, you will wonder why your mother, who loved you and treasured you, managed her life so strangely. Perhaps then you will find the right answer to this question, perhaps a better one than I myself could give you today.

  It was after she wrote that letter that they took her out and hanged her from a hook in the ceiling. There was no drop. According to the official report, Milada Horáková took fifteen minutes to die, by strangulation, hanging on the end of the rope.

  Is that enough?

  It’s not a competition, is it? But by any standards Milada Horáková must rate as one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century.

  16

  Lenka’s mother opened a drawer in the table and took out a photograph, a snapshot of a young couple sitting on a rock. The pair were wearing hiking boots. The woman—a version of herself, an earlier, happy, clear, vivid version (a version, too, of Lenka)—was laughing at the camera, but the man was doing nothing more than smile, a little ironically, as though he already knew there was little to be amused by.

  “There we are, in our Marxist-Leninist dawn,” the woman said. “Weren’t we beautiful? We saw the future as something wonderful to imagine. Certainly not this.”

  “This” meant the narrow, two-room apartment with thin walls and gray plaster, and the sensation of being in some kind of concrete storage tank. “This” meant Horáková dead. “This” meant Soviet troops on Czech soil and a summons from Moscow to the Czech leadership to attend an emergency meeting at a railway junction on the border of the Soviet Union. “This” meant her whole world. She replaced the photo with care.

  “So what happened?” Sam dared to ask.

  The woman drew on her cigarette, considering him through the smoke. “Do you know about Slánský?”

  The name sounded like a cymbal struck. Of course he knew about Slánský. He knew about Horáková; he knew about Slánský. Slánský was a Party hack, the kind of man to dismiss bourgeois freedoms with a derisive sweep of the hand, the architect of the communist coup of 1948 and, thereby, the man who became the right hand of the Party leader, Klement Gottwald.

  “The Party was like a monster,” the woman said. “First it consumed its enemies—Horáková and her kind—and then it turned on its own members. What was the name of the Greek god who devoured his own children?”

  “Cronus.”

  “That’s right. So, like Cronus, the Party devoured its own children, Slánský, Clementis and the others. How many in all? Fifteen, sixteen? Espionage on behalf of Western capitalist powers, counterrevolution, all kinds of trumped-up charges. What do they call it? Show trial. Like something you might put on in the theater. That’s what it was, the theater of the absurd.”

  She nodded in Lenka’s direction. “She was only a baby. She remembers nothing about it. Have you heard of Margolius? Rudolf Margolius?”

  Was she testing him, seeing how much he knew and therefore how much he was worth? “He was a Czech trade representative,” Sam said, “dealing with Western countries.”

  The woman nodded, drawing on her cigarette as though sucking in courage. “Well, Rudolf Margolius worked with my husband. They were part of the Czechoslovak delegation in London, trying to set up trade deals that would benefit the country. Trying to earn hard currency for the country, that’s what they were doing. The ministry of foreign trade. And that was why they were arrested, along with Slánský and the rest. They’d been abroad, so they must be guilty.”

  She talked some more, eager to explain to someone who would listen. Her husband was a clever man, too clever for his own good. If you were stupid then you got on. You did what you were told and nothing more. Don’t show any initiative, don’t show any imagination, above all, don’t show any intelligence. That was the way to progress. It’s not much different now. “He negotiated with Harold Wilson,” she added. “Do you know Mr. Harold Wilson?”

  Sam tried a smile. “Not personally. He’s a little above my grade.”

  The woman didn’t smile back. Instead she made a face, as though she had eaten something distasteful. “My husband didn’t say much about his work but he told me about this man, Wilson. So when my husband was in prison, I wrote to Wilson for some kind of help. It seems futile, doesn’t it? But what else could I do? I was helpless, powerless, just an irrelevance as far as the Party was concerned. My husband was on trial for his life but I could go fuck.”

  “Maminka!”

  She waved Lenka’s protest away. “I thought, maybe this Wilson can help. Does that sound crazy? But I was crazy. I wasn’t allowed even to visit my husband in prison. Just one letter a month, and nothing in it about what was happening to him. So I thought about what Lukáš had told me about his visits to London and I got this Wilson’s title exact so that the letter would reach the correct person: President of the Board of Trade, that was it.” She said the title in some kind of English and looked at Sam for approval, to see if she had got it right.

  He nodded.

  “I wrote the letter myself and had a friend translate it into English. I begged this Wilson for help, asked him to write and explain to the judge that my husband was an honorable man who never did anything other than try to get the very best for his country in the negotiations. And surely, being a fellow socialist, this Wilson would be able to confirm that this was so. Wilson is a socialist, isn’t he?”

  “Of a kind.”

  “So, a kind of socialist. A bourgeois, Western socialist. I got someone to smuggle the letter out of the country because you couldn’t just put something like that in the post.”

  “And what happened?”

  She gave a wry smile, as though disappointment was only to be expected. “Nothing happened. I never heard from him.”

  Sam felt a moment of shame. “Wilson should have replied. Something. Anything.”

  “But he didn’t. And now he is your prime minister.” She got up and went over to the cooker to check the food in the oven, talking all the time. Perhaps it was a sign of the liberalization in the country that she felt she could tell the story. “They were Jews, you know that? Most of them were Jews.” The Czech word židi rang round the room. “My husband’s parents were Jews but he was an atheist, a communist, a good communist. But they treated him like a traitor and a Jew.”

  “Mother, please,” said Lenka. “This was meant to be a happy occasion. Sunday lunch. A family thing.”

  “We have no family,” her mother snapped. “Two people isn’t a family, it’s just survivors clinging to the wreckage.” The oven door slammed shut. Sam tried to step around the obstacle that lay in the path of further discourse. “Weren’t they all”—he struggled for the correct word—”made good in 1963?” That was all he could manage: exonerated, absolved, acquitted, exculpated. All words beyond Sam’s vocabulary in Czech.

  Kateřina laughed. It was the kind
of laugh you heard often enough in Prague, the laughter of contempt and resignation. “What good was that to me? By then he was ten years dead.”

  Lenka was still holding the snapshot of the couple sitting on a rock. Perhaps to her the world of that snapshot seemed too far away, another time in another country of which she knew nothing. Perhaps that faintly smiling figure who had been her father was a creature of myth. Yet for an adult, for her mother, it was a mere sixteen years.

  “He doesn’t even have a grave, do you know that? I don’t know what they did with his body. They just told me of his death by letter. It took me a year even to get an official death certificate. And now—”

  “Now?”

  “A few months ago they sent me a medal, his medal. The Order of the Republic.” She made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a cry. “And now they say they want to give me compensation. But I don’t want their medals or their money. I want my husband back.”

  That was the moment when Sam feared she might weep. But she didn’t. There was something hard and dry about her face, as though the tears had long since drained away like water through the limestone of the Moravian karst.

  “I not only lost him, I even had to lose his name. He was Vadinský, Lukáš Vadinský. I was Kateřina Vadinská. But someone, a friend, advised me to go back to my unmarried name, so that was what I did. Konečková.” She smiled bitterly. “Another betrayal.”

  “It’s the past, Maminka,” Lenka said. “Things have already changed. And they are changing still.”

  Her mother ignored her words. She began to lay the table with ill-matched plates, cutlery that you might find in a cheap café, a cruet set of Bohemian cut glass, two stemmed wineglasses and a tumbler. She shook her head. “The past,” she said, “is all we have. It just repeats itself.”

  * * *