Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  Which story do you believe? The lake or the snowdrift? And which would you like to believe? And which — because this is the key to everything — sounds more perfectly Czech? What is certain is that the whole disposal was done in secret and is unlikely to be properly documented even in the archives of our beloved StB where they keep all the other files, including those of my mother and me…and, no doubt, you.

  Except that I changed my name so that Lenka Vadinská would not be stigmatized by being denied access to a university education but instead Lenka Konečková would sail into the faculty of literature. Still — ask my boyfriend — I smell just as much of roses as if I were called Vadinská, or, as I’m sure the authorities would have it, just as much of shit.

  He looked over her shoulder at what she had written so far and laughed. “Will they allow ‘shit’?”

  She shrugged. “We’ll see.” And went back to her typing while he went back to watching her. Her hunched figure of concentration over the typewriter. Her bare legs. The way her toes moved as though they had life of their own. Things like that.

  And then the phone rang. He went out into the hallway to answer it and at first he didn’t recognize the voice on the other end. “Mr. Samuel Wareham?” it asked, almost whispering. He might not have known the identity of the caller but he did know the whisper. It was the natural instinct of someone who fears the line may be tapped, as though lowering the voice might make it less easily heard.

  “Sam Wareham here, yes.”

  “This is your pianist friend,” the voice said. Suddenly the Russian accent was obvious. “I would like to meet, is that possible? Immediately. At Stalin?”

  “What is this all about?”

  “Just a meeting, Mr. Wareham, at Stalin, you know? As soon as you can.”

  It was there in the voice, an urgency and a sense of panic just beneath the surface calm. Sam said, “It’ll take me fifteen minutes or so. Is that all right?”

  “Of course.” And then the line went dead.

  He stood for a moment trying to make sense of the call. Stalin was clear enough, although Stalin was no longer there, hadn’t been ever since they blew him up in 1962. Until that moment he had been the largest monumental statue in Europe, a fifteen-meter granite representation of the great leader standing on the edge of the Letná escarpment overlooking the city. All that remained now was the massive stone plinth on which the monument had been erected, but they had called the place u Stalina, “at Stalin,” ever since. Tourists went there during the day for the view over the city; couples went there after dark when the view really didn’t matter very much.

  “I’m going to have to go out for a while,” he told Lenka. “Half an hour maybe.”

  The typing stopped. She looked round. “Now? On your own?”

  He considered. Motives clashed against each other—loyalty and betrayal and some ridiculous sense of professional propriety, but also plain fear, fear for her and fear for himself. What if? What if this were all some complicated entrapment? Should he get hold of the SIS man, Harold Saumarez? Backup of some kind? But as far as Sam knew Harold didn’t have a team of heavies to give him help. He’d only panic.

  “On my own.”

  She didn’t ask anything more, that was what impressed him. “Is it about the same dog as last time?”

  He smiled. “It’s Egorkin. The conductor. He wants to meet me at Stalin.”

  “Letná Park? Is he a queer or something?”

  He laughed, looking for a pen and scribbling Harold’s phone number on a scrap of paper. “If I’m not back by midnight, ring this number and tell him. He’s Harold.”

  She looked at him. She appeared entirely composed, neither concerned nor fearful. “Why are you afraid?”

  “Not afraid, just cautious.”

  She nodded. “I remember cutting a lecture to see Stalin being blown up. We watched from the other side of the river and we cheered when it went BOOM! The police tried to clear us away. People were meant to stay indoors.”

  “It won’t be as dramatic as that this evening.”

  “I hope not.” She turned back to the typewriter.

  What’s in a name? The man I was introducing myself to, using my original name for the first time, happened to be the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček. There’s a name with import, a sturdy Bohemian oak* (which is ironic because, as we all know, Comrade Dubček is actually Slovak). “You appear to know who I am, dear miss,” he said. “Perhaps I might know to whom I am speaking?” And so I told him.

  Recognizing my name, the Bohemian (and Slovak) oak seemed to sway in the wind for a moment…

  * Dub, an oak. Čech, Bohemian.

  34

  The vast Letná parade ground, where the Party gathered to celebrate May Day, appeared deserted; across the road, the Sparta Prague stadium was a mass of darkness. Sam parked the car as inconspicuously as possible, hiding it beneath trees with its number plates masked by bushes. There were people around in the dusk, young lovers looking for somewhere to be alone, a group sitting in a circle on one of the lawns around an apology for a campfire. A guitar was being strummed. There was laughter, some singing, the glow of cigarettes. A crescent moon was just rising—barely enough light to follow the paths through the trees towards the edge of the plateau where steps led down to a paved esplanade overlooking the river and the Old Town.

  Moonlight glimmered faintly on the great curve of the river below. Beyond the water the Old Town buildings were picked out in lights. He could make out the needle-like spires of the Týn Church thrust upwards into the belly of the night sky. Behind him the wall at the back of the esplanade seemed huge, the bastion of a fortress. It was up there that the great monument had once stood, the largest group sculpture in Europe—a gaggle of workers, farm laborers and soldiers all pushing and shoving behind the solemn figure of Joseph Vissaryonovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, who stood at the front and looked thoughtfully over the city. With bitter irony they nicknamed it fronta na maso, the meat queue. Constructed of seventeen thousand tons of reinforced concrete and clad with thirty thousand blocks of granite, it was an exercise in posthumous sycophancy, because by the time it was finished Stalin had already been dead two years. On the orders of Moscow the grandiose monument was demolished in 1962.

  How do you demolish such a monstrosity without getting egg on your face? You first attempt to hide the whole construction behind wooden fencing before blowing it up with a total of one thousand eight hundred pounds of high explosive and hoping that no one notices. As it was built in the most prominent place in the entire city, that is rather difficult.

  It is said that President Novotný wept when the monument vanished in a cloud of concrete bits and granite chippings. What is certain is that the original designer of the thing did not shed a tear over its disappearance—he was long dead, having committed suicide a month before it was officially unveiled.

  And now? Now there was nothing. Elsewhere in the night sky there were stars, but not there. It was as though the vanished presence of Uncle Joe still cast a kind of shadow, a void that seemed vaster and more frightening than any material monument to the man.

  Sam stood close to the wall, feeling happier with his back to the stones. It was like standing on an ill-lit stage, waiting for the lights to come up and the performance to begin. There were others already there, mere blots in the uncertain light: a couple sitting, apparently wrapped in each other’s arms, on the low wall that would be the apron of the stage; a solitary male figure standing apart, smoking. Was that Egorkin?

  Shadows played tricks with perspective. Doubts crowded in. This was idiotic. What the hell did the Russian want? He thought of Lenka back in the flat, typing away at her fejeton and thinking of bed. He thought of the bed itself, a place that only had meaning with her couched within it.

  Meanwhile on the esplanade a second figure joined the solitary one. The two exchanged a few words and went off together into the shadows. Sam alm
ost laughed out loud. Queers. A world of secrecy and evasion existing below the surface of everyday life just as surely as the world of spies and traitors. Was this, he wondered, Egorkin’s idea of a joke? He lit a cigarette and glanced at his watch. The luminous minute hand crept on. A cigarette seemed as good a measure of time as anything. He’d finish this cigarette and then go.

  He took a last drag, dropped the butt on the ground and stamped it out. As he was about to walk away the fused couple on the wall divided amoeba-like into two individuals. One of them walked across the esplanade towards him, leaving the other seated, watching, her face a smudge of white against the shadows.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you,” Egorkin said. It was hard to make out his expression—just shadows, an abstract combination of dark and light. But his voice was unsteady, as though there was a fracture somewhere deep within it.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s…there’s been a problem.” He glanced behind him at the lonely figure. “We are in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” It sounded ridiculous, the kind of euphemism used to cover teenage pregnancy.

  “We’re being sent back to Moscow. Our program for the next week has been canceled. Tomorrow, that’s what I’ve been told.” His hand darted across the shadows and grabbed Sam’s wrist. “We have no time, that’s the truth. We must go now.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m asking you for help. We are. Both of us. Now.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “This is not the moment for jokes, is it? We need to be taken to the British embassy.”

  Sam had a moment’s vision of the chaos and confusion were he to knock on the embassy gate at eleven-thirty on Friday night with a couple of renegade Russians in tow.

  “Look, I haven’t spoken with anyone yet. Haven’t had the opportunity, and now it’s the weekend. I can’t just turn up with you. They’d have to get the ambassador out of bed. I’m in his bad books already this evening. Me trying to deliver the two of you into his care would be the last straw.”

  “But there is no time. They will soon see that we are both missing. It won’t take them long to realize we have left the hotel.”

  “And if I do get you into the embassy, the story will be in Moscow by lunchtime tomorrow. You’ll end up trapped there with no way of getting you out and Mr. Brezhnev demanding satisfaction from the Czechoslovak government.”

  “You have no secrecy?”

  “Locally employed people. Maids, stewards, even some secretaries in the consulate. They all report to the StB.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  It was ridiculous. The whole situation was ridiculous. He could, of course, offer his apologies and walk away. That would be the safer option, at least for Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British Embassy; not for Gennady Egorkin and Nadezhda Pankova, though. “I’ll take you to my flat,” he said, “at least for tonight. Then we’ll see.”

  The girl came over, a small figure with the stolid face of a Russian peasant. Very different from the slight, fierce figure he had seen in concert. “Nadezhda Nikolayevna,” she said, shaking his hand. She seemed sullen rather than frightened. What, Sam wondered, was her particular talent as far as Egorkin was concerned? But then the man took the girl’s hand and she looked up to give him a sudden, fleeting smile and Sam thought maybe, just maybe, it was love.

  “Don’t you have a suitcase or anything?” he asked. “Clothes? Washing things?”

  “Nothing. Not even Nadia’s violin. It would have been suspicious. We were rehearsing for our recital tomorrow and we stepped out of the hotel for some fresh air. That’s it.”

  The sheer idiocy of their action crowded in on Sam. No planning, no preparation, just acting on the spur of the moment. Like children. Here I am, please sort it out. Was this the artistic nature Egorkin had talked about? You are a functionary, he had said accusingly. But at least functionaries plan ahead.

  They made their way to the car, walking slowly—that was what Sam suggested—as though strolling through the park in the evening was the most normal thing to be doing. Ahead where the campfire flickered through the trees there was something else flickering—the blue light of a police car. Egorkin stopped.

  “It’s just kids being moved on,” Sam said.

  They walked forward until the patrol car was visible. Familiar white door panels and the letters VB in black; the blue light sparking on the roof; a cluster of figures gathered round it, arguing. The kids argued with the police these days. As big a change as you could imagine. Egorkin and the violinist followed Sam past the scene and a few moments later they were climbing into the Mercedes and feeling safer. Not safe but safer. As he started the engine Sam wondered a dozen things but the most immediate was, what the hell was he going to do about these people? What would Eric Whittaker say? What would the ambassador say? What the fuck would the Foreign Office say when one of their officers had picked up a couple of stray Russian musicians and offered them sanctuary? Embarrassment, that was the great fear. If you want to make it to the top, a senior diplomat had once told him, never, ever embarrass the Office. Embarrassment is the one unforgivable crime.

  There was something funereal about the drive back down to Malá Strana. Egorkin and Sam sat in the front like two undertaker mutes while the girl sat alone in the back like a principal mourner, sniffing quietly to herself.

  In the square outside his apartment building there was nobody about, no watching policemen, no waiting cars, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. A light showed behind the curtains at the windows of his sitting room, which gave him some kind of comfort. He ushered his passengers from the car into the building. The hallway was silent and empty. They crept up like thieves to the second floor. His door key grating in the lock seemed loud and intrusive, an alarm to waken the dead.

  “It’s me,” he called into the interior of the flat as he opened the door. “I’ve got people with me.”

  There was a moment when he thought perhaps she had gone. And then she was there at the door to their bedroom, bare-legged with a towel held to her front, her face pale with anxiety, her eyes wide.

  “Go back inside,” he told her. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  The Russians had followed him in. They stood now, a disconsolate couple, in the middle of the hallway, like refugees from the outbreak of war. Egorkin seemed diminished in size compared with the man Sam had encountered in the gardens in Mariánské Lázně. And the woman beside him, who had appeared proud and vigorous onstage, was now seen in the hall light to be a mere slip, a bewildered child looking at him with horror, as though the full import of what she had done was only just dawning on her.

  Sam pushed them past the bedroom and the living room, past the kitchen and bathroom to the spare room at the back. There was nothing there beyond some of his old clothes. The bed wasn’t even made up, hadn’t been touched ever since his mother had come to stay the previous year. He found some sheets in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe and tossed them to Nadia. “You’ll have to make the bed,” he said in Russian, and she smiled at hearing her own language in a foreign mouth. “Towels, soap, but I haven’t got anything else. Not even a spare toothbrush. We’ll have to get stuff for you in the morning. I can find you something to eat if you want.”

  They wanted nothing. Frugal was the watchword for Russian defectors in the hands of their hosts. Egorkin sat on the bed, bent forward with his elbows on his knees and his forearms hanging slack between his legs. He wore the expression of someone who has jumped over the cliff and suddenly understands that there is no way to go but down. It was the girl, Nadezhda Pankova, who started to do something. She shoved him off the bed and into the only chair in the room. Then she began to make the bed, as though housework was the solution to all their problems.

  Sam closed the door on them and went back to his own room where Lenka waited, her face set against the world. “What are they doing here?” she asked.

  Sam began to undress. “T
hey are guests for the night.”

  “They are Russians. Perhaps they are musicians, but they are Russians. Why are they here?”

  “Because they have just run away from Russia.”

  She considered this, looking at him with suspicious eyes. “Who can blame them?”

  35

  A brief telephone call, first thing next day. Sam tried to picture Eric Whittaker in his pajamas, yawning and scratching his head and trying to work out who this might be disturbing him so early on Saturday morning. And Madeleine lying in bed beside him, wearing, presumably, some exotic French nightdress. “Guests? What guests?” Eric asked irritably.

  “Perhaps if you were to come round. I’d rather not talk over the phone.”

  * * *

  Whittaker was round in fifteen minutes. Sam opened the door to him and ushered him into the sitting room. “It’s Gennady Egorkin,” he said before Whittaker could utter a word.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s here, in the spare room.”

  “Here?”

  “He called me last night. Threw himself on my mercy, more or less. Him and his girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Nadezhda Pankova, the violinist. You saw her playing the Brahms. And then I heard them in Mariánské Lázně, and—”

  “What the hell’s going on, Sam?”

  “They’re looking for asylum.”

  “Asylum? And you’ve done what exactly? Taken it upon yourself to grant it to them?”

  “Not exactly. I just thought we ought to consider it. There’s nothing wrong with putting them up for the night, is there? And then we can go from there.”

  “Nothing wrong? For fuck’s sake!” Eric Whittaker’s face seemed about to explode. There was something almost geological about it, his whole countenance trembling under the onslaught of internal disturbances like the surface ripples from an earthquake buried deep below his crust of elegant complacency. Occasional eruptions broke out along the fault lines. A twitch, an open mouth, a grimace. “What do you want, Sam? A row with the Soviet Union just when they’re looking to pick a fight with the Czechos? Jesus Christ!”