Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “Is that a joke? I presume it is a joke. Anyway, I’ve had it with your bloody tent.”

  He ignores her and keeps on walking. Perhaps one of those abandoned houses which they passed a while back? Perhaps the ditch beside the road? Perhaps that line of forest away to the right? They plod onwards…

  24

  Afternoon sunshine on the forests and fields of Bohemia. The embassy car reversed the route of the day before, passing through the West German border post without let or hindrance, crossing the bridge over the stream and climbing the slope through no-man’s-land towards the Czech customs post. The car slowed to a crawl. There was a queue of cars at the normal channel, a jaunty wave of recognition as the Humber moved towards the reserved lane. The barrier went up. Lenka relaxed her grip.

  “Not even a carton of cigarettes,” Sam said. “But a pint for Derrick.”

  “Two, you said. And none of that fizzy Czech stuff. Watneys.”

  The car cruised on. Ahead two figures appeared at the edge of the road. Long hair and jeans. The usual uniform. “Hitchhikers,” Derrick said. His policeman’s mind came into play. Regulations were regulations no matter where you were. “Shouldn’t be hitchhiking in the border zone. Could find themselves inside.” He slowed and pulled out to pass them. Sam glanced out of the side window. GB.

  “Better stop, Derrick. Otherwise the police will pick them up and the consular department will have to deal with it. No end of a fuss.”

  The car came to a slow and reluctant halt. Lenka looked round. The two hitchers were shuffling forward under the weight of their rucksacks, looking bedraggled and grimy. A boy with a fledgling beard. A girl with chaotic hair.

  “Bloody kids,” said Derrick.

  Sam opened the door and climbed out as the couple approached. “Going to Prague?”

  They came to a panting halt beside the car. “You’re English,” the boy said. “I wondered what a Humber was doing here.”

  “Embassy car, actually. You’re lucky. It’s forbidden to hitchhike in the border zone. You could have got yourselves arrested.”

  “So sir’s come to tell us off, has he?” the girl said.

  “Actually, he’s come to offer you a lift.” Sam opened the boot of the car. “You may put your packs in with Her Majesty’s diplomatic bags as long as you can assure me that they do not contain any illegal substances. My name’s Samuel Wareham, by the way. Sam to friends and associates, but you may call me ‘sir’ if you like.”

  Chastened, the pair climbed into the backseat. A faint smell of unwashed bodies accompanied them. Lenka edged up to give them room and Sam took his place in front. “I’m Ellie,” the girl said. “He’s James.”

  “From Oxford,” the boy added.

  “City or university?”

  “University.”

  “Which college?”

  He told him. “And Ellie’s at St. Hilda’s.”

  “And you’re going to Prague…?”

  “To suss the place out, really. Spur-of-the-moment decision. And to hear Birgit Eckstein play.”

  “Are you musicians?”

  “We know her.”

  “Do you indeed?”

  The girl explained—hitching through the Black Forest, a lift from a couple of Germans, one of whom was the cellist. “So we thought—”

  The boy interrupted. “No thought involved, just the toss of a coin. Italy or here, that was the choice.” His accent was from the North. South Yorkshire, Sam thought. Other side of the Pennines from Derrick. Chip on his shoulder, but that was hardly his fault when he found himself confronted by Oxford.

  “So you’ve opted for Slav drama, rather than Italian opera? Well, be careful. Prague’s all very exciting at the moment, but if you want to avoid getting into trouble, be careful what you do or say.”

  “Is that sir talking?” the girl said.

  “Just a piece of advice. We don’t want to be arranging consular visits and trying to contact your parents to explain that their little darlings are in Pankrác prison.”

  “You didn’t do that for me when I was arrested in Paris last May.”

  “What were you doing there? Playing at revolutions? Here they have them for real—and that’s why it’s so dangerous. Ask Lenka.”

  From her corner Lenka made a little moue of distaste. “I don’t want to talk about things. They’re young. Let them enjoy themselves.”

  “As long as it’s not at the taxpayer’s expense.”

  “Aren’t you enjoying yourself at the taxpayer’s expense?” the girl said.

  Sam laughed. She was a snappy young lady and would, he didn’t doubt, make a shrewish woman. “You’d make a good politician. Where are you staying in Prague?”

  “No idea,” the boy replied. “A hostel or something.”

  “It’s not easy, accommodation in Prague. There’s a chronic shortage of beds, just like there’s shortages of everything else. It’s the result of a command economy. If no one has ordered hostels and hotels, hostels and hotels don’t get built.”

  “I can help maybe,” said Lenka. “You can have my room.” She glanced at Sam. “For a few days?” She wasn’t intending to go back to her mother’s exiguous flat, he could see that by her look. Sam thought about Steffie and her reluctance to move in with him. Just the occasional night. Perhaps a weekend. “We have to recognize the proprieties,” she had warned him whenever he’d suggested a more permanent arrangement. She had sounded like someone in a prewar drawing-room drama. And now Lenka was looking at him with that knowing smile, as though proprieties meant nothing.

  VI

  25

  The girl called Lenka has, it seems, taken them under her wing. James had thought her cold and indifferent when they first encountered her in the embassy car with that stuck-up Wareham bloke, but it appears he was wrong. Under her wing, in hand, whatever turn of phrase you choose. She’s given up the room she rents in a friend’s flat in the New Town, an area of largely nineteenth-century buildings beyond the square that everyone has heard of in the West, the square that isn’t a square, named after the king who wasn’t a king—Václavské náměstí, Wenceslas Square. “There you are,” she says, handing them over to their new hosts. “You will be happy.” Which is unlikely but full of good intent.

  The flat is cramped and, despite being up under the roofs, cave-like. The ceilings slope, things are stacked in the awkward space where the ceiling meets the floor, the doors are low enough to catch out those unwilling to bow their heads. An upright piano occupies one wall of the living room, a poster by Alfons Mucha another. There is a family photograph—my grandparents, Jitka says—of a couple staring disapprovingly out of the Austria-Hungary Empire into the People’s Republic of Czechoslovakia. A violin case stands against the wall beside a gramophone and a cabinet of records. Their hosts are musicians, a violinist with one of the orchestras of the city and a composer. Jitka is the violinist’s name. She’s a sharp, nervous woman with a fine face that hasn’t quite discovered how to be beautiful but is instead merely trying to be interesting. Dark eyes and a sharp nose. A mole like a small blackcurrant above the corner of her mouth. Jitka is what everyone calls her, but her given name is Judita, the Czech version of Judith, she explains. Then she looks faintly embarrassed, as though such things don’t really matter. “You call me Jitka.”

  Jitka’s English is good. Not as fully developed as Lenka’s but more colloquial. She spent six months in America, on an exchange, playing in a youth orchestra in New York. She knows the West…and now, she says, we will become like the West. If the Russians allow us.

  Zdeněk, her husband, mutters something that Jitka translates. “He says I should have stayed there.” She laughs to show it’s a joke. “It was just before we married. I guess he means I could have stayed there and gotten him to join me. Or maybe that he is not happy being married to me.” More laughter, weaker this time, which makes it even less convincing. Zdeněk scowls. Composing seems to involve great anguish, because he wears an expression of gr
im disenchantment—they call him Bručoun, Jitka says, which is the name for Grumpy, the bad-tempered dwarf in the Snow White cartoon. “But he is also very political,” she says. “Maybe we are all political these days.”

  The room that Lenka has vacated for them is a contrast to the rest of the flat—strangely feminine, like a teenager’s bedroom. A painting of horses galloping on a beach, family photographs on the dressing table, one of them showing a young couple holding aloft a baby that may be Lenka herself, another showing her as a young girl dressed in some kind of uniform. Apart from these, an older photo shows a solemn couple standing amongst the props of a photographer’s studio—a classical column, a bowl of flowers. On the bed a teddy bear sits waiting for an owner who has surely grown up and gone away. The bed itself threatens more than it promises.

  After unpacking their things Ellie and James discuss the price of the room with Jitka. She wants payment in dollars. “We need the dollars. For when we go abroad.”

  “It’ll have to be pounds. We’ve only got sterling.”

  Pounds will do. Hard currency is what matters. Jitka apologizes, as though renting the room to them is somehow wrong. On the occasional street corner in the center of the city touts offer koruny for dollars at four times the official exchange rate. “Be careful doing that,” Jitka warns. “Police often pretend to do it in order to catch you. If you want, it is better if I do any exchange for you. This,” she adds in parenthesis, “is what we’re reduced to.”

  Her husband smokes, thin, dark cigarettes with a powerful smell that seems to have been absorbed into the fabric of the flat. He works in the living room at the upright piano on which he plays figures while scribbling the spidery signs of musical notation on sheets of manuscript paper. His wish is to compose symphonies and concertos; his job is to write jingles for television. Ellie and James try to talk music with them. Ellie is better at this of course, but they both have the connection with Frau Eckstein to relate. Does Jitka know Birgit Eckstein?

  A squeal of delight. Of course! Birgit Eckstein is giving a concert. Jitka plays in the orchestra. She can get tickets if they want. “Here in Prague there is much music. More than in New York or London, I think. The government puts money into music because you cannot see the politics in music.”

  James asks how much the tickets will be and Jitka laughs, embarrassed. “No, a gift from me to you.”

  * * *

  At night James and Ellie can hear Jitka and her husband through the thin partition walls making love in the next room. “Making love” seems a misnomer: it is an urgent, painful sound, like people at manual labor of some repetitive kind, working in a factory making useless products for a socialist command economy.

  * * *

  Next morning they venture out into the city, with an agreement to meet Lenka for coffee at the Kavárna Slavia. “It is where all writers get together,” she explained when they made the arrangement. “Everyone argues. It will be interesting.”

  So James and Ellie wander the streets of Nové Město, the New Town, finding them drab and dusty. The few shops have plain windows and sparsely packed shelves. The buildings, nineteenth-century most of them, appear tarnished and battered, like pieces of forgotten family silver found behind a locked door. Advertisements seem half-hearted, as though there is little point in making much impact because no one’s really buying. Trams packed with people clang and grind along the wider roads. In Wenceslas Square there’s some kind of public meeting: a speaker harangues a small crowd. Flags fly. Perhaps it’s a celebration of some kind, but it’s impossible to tell. As they walk away a man darts out of a side street and tries to sell them something. James assumes it’s sex of some kind; Ellie imagines stolen goods. But it’s just money he wants to sell, Czech crowns for hard currency. “Good rate,” he says, presumably the only English he knows.

  * * *

  The café where they are to meet Lenka is on the corner of National Street, overlooking the river and immediately opposite the proud but grimy bulk of the National Theatre. Inside there is noise and the smell of coffee and cigarettes. People come and go, greeting, talking, arguing, ordering against the shrill percussion of china against metal. Waiters patrol between the tables with trays held high. Surreptitiously Lenka points out one particular table that is full of discussion or argument, it is hard to tell which. “There they are,” she whispers, as though they are specimens—rare birds, perhaps—that might be frightened away by any sudden movement on the part of observers. She mentions names that mean nothing—Collage, Herschel, Cherney—while James and Ellie watch discreetly but uncomprehending. “It is like Paris,” Lenka explains, without admitting that she has never been there. “Writers and philosophers discussing in the cafés.”

  The idea appeals to Ellie. She wants to know all about it, about the writers and the philosophy, about the demonstration in Wenceslas Square and the arguments all around them. There’s the frustration of not being able to decipher a single word. Shop fronts, newspaper headlines, protest banners, all equally opaque. “What’s going on? What’s happening?” she asks.

  Lenka looks helpless. “The Russians want one thing, we want another, and so there are meetings to talk. Meetings, meetings. Words, words, words. They speak of fraternal comrades and all kinds of kec. What’s kec? Rubbish, nonsense. But everyone knows that Brezhnev holds a gun to Dubček’s head and Dubček dares him to pull the trigger.”

  “Russian roulette.”

  Lenka manages a dry laugh. “Ruská ruleta. You see it is not so difficult—we say the same thing. But this is true, that Dubček understands Russians—he lived many years in Russia, he speaks perfect Russian—but Brezhnev understands nothing of us. So, you see Dubček wins. That, at least, is what we hope.”

  Jitka joins them at their table. Both women seem excited by the presence of these visitors from the West. There are things to discuss—what Ellie and James should see, what they should do. There are so many sights in this city. An English guidebook has been found. Plans have to be made. It is so exciting. Even Ellie is excited. If she has been in a bad mood in the last few days, all is now changed with this experience of her first socialist country, the one with the human face.

  When James asks why they are being so helpful neither woman is the least bit disconcerted by his question. “Because we want to make you love our city,” Jitka says. “We want to make the whole world love our city.”

  Lenka interrupts. “In the West no one knows anything about Prague. They try to forget Prague after they betrayed us in 1938. Do you know about 1938?”

  “The Munich accord?”

  “Accord? Does accord mean agreement? But we did not agree to anything. Mnichovská zrada, that is what we call it. The Munich betrayal. And because of this betrayal we are forgotten, our country is forgotten, Prague is forgotten, and who cares that it is most beautiful city in Europe? So we need people like you to help the world rediscover our city and our country. And to protect it against the Russians.”

  One of the writers, a short, gingery man in a leather jacket, gets up and walks past their table. He gives a toothy smile, pausing to greet Lenka in the way that you do when you’re not certain whether you recognize someone or not. There’s a brief exchange in Czech, a blizzard of consonants. Lenka agrees with something said, laughs and offers a comment that clearly refers to English students rescued from the streets.

  “Ahoj,” he says to them, sounding bizarrely nautical in this landlocked country. “Here is good,” he tells them and they agree, it is good. “Very interesting.”

  But he has to go. Clearly something calls him. “Čau,” he says, the Italian ciao borrowed just to show how bright and carefree Czechoslovakia has become. They watch him leave, going out through the door into the street and glancing back at the last minute to give a jaunty little wave. “He is a writer of plays,” Lenka explains. “Very important.”

  Ghosts

  That writer of plays is a ghost now, just another of the city’s many ghosts, for Prague is a trul
y haunted place. You can feel them around you. Some of them are just that, mundane ghosts that the tourist trade loves—golems, headless knights, wronged women, all that kind of thing—but there are others, there are others. The ghosts of the tens of thousands of Prague Jews killed by the Nazis, for example. Or the ghost of Franz Kafka, that anxiety-ridden man with the beady eyes and the sharp, inquisitive features (a rodent? a bird?) who pinned humanity to the pages of his fiction like so many insect specimens.

  Although he was a Jew, Kafka escaped being murdered by the Nazis by dying of TB in 1924 (his three sisters were not so lucky), but his ghost still haunts the city, along with the spirit of his greatest novel, the one he never finished and never wanted published, the one he called Das Schloss, The Castle. But when people here refer to the Castle, they are not talking of Kafka’s masterpiece, which in Czech goes by the title Zámek, “Château,” but rather the seat of the president, as one might talk of the White House in the USA. And there it is, on the far side of the river as seen beyond the arguing writers through the windows of the Café Slavia: Hrad, Das Schloss, The Castle, dominating the town beneath, whose resigned inhabitants accept every complex, tortuous, irrational, absurd edict generated by the various organs of bureaucratic power—Federal Assembly, Party apparatus, Ministry—but signed off by the principal inhabitant of the Castle. Indeed, in his novel Kafka might almost have been prophesying the state that has come to pass in his home city less than three decades after his death, where fear is integral and endemic, where bureaucracy shuffles the cards and then loses them, where you are what the files say you are, where all is happy because it is decreed to be happy, and all is successful because that is what success is.