by Simon Mawer
“I just did what any human being would do—tried to help them.”
“Human being? But you’re not a human being—you’re a bloody British diplomat!”
He turned away and went over to the window, stood there looking out at the dunce-cap towers of the bridge gate rising over the neighboring roofs. “What the hell is H.E. going to say? I’ve no idea but I tell you one thing, whatever the final outcome, this is going down on your annual report as a pretty black mark.”
Sam smiled, grateful that Eric had his back to him because he would only have interpreted the expression as mocking or smug or something, whereas really it was relief. “My annual report against two artists desperate for freedom? It doesn’t really balance, does it, Eric?”
Whittaker turned. “Do you know how pompous that sounds, Sam?”
“You know Gennady Egorkin, Eric. You’ve been to one of his concerts—”
“Two, actually. Heard him playing Beethoven at the Royal Festival Hall a couple of years ago.”
“So you understand his importance. And Pankova. We’re talking about artists here. I know it doesn’t fit in with politics or economics or whatever it is that occupies the Foreign Office mind at the moment, but it’s every bit as important. I mean, look at Ashkenazy, for example. Or Nureyev. Not only a triumph for art but also—”
“A triumph for politics.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, a humanitarian act.”
“But it’s the political side of things that London appreciates. And anyway, the wretched man is here, not in London.”
“So we get him out.”
“That, my dear Sam, is easier said than done.” Whittaker shook his head despairingly. “Look, I’ll have a word with him if you like, but I don’t want to give him the impression that this is official, is that clear? Not until we’ve got some kind of clearance from head office. Or at least from H.E. So the story is, Egorkin appealed to you and you took him and his girlfriend back to your flat as nothing more than an act of kindness. A private decision. Is that clear?”
It was clear. It was precisely what Sam had told them. “I’m not a bloody idiot, Eric.”
“That, dear fellow, remains to be seen.”
Egorkin was duly summoned to the sitting room to meet with the Head of Chancery and be told the hard truth, that his appeal would be considered but that it put Her Majesty’s government in a very difficult position at this crucial time in relations with Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. For the moment he and his companion could only consider themselves private guests of Mr. Wareham—after all there was nothing wrong with that—but they could not themselves rely on any official diplomatic protection from the British embassy.
“Perhaps,” Egorkin said, with solemn pride, “you can contact Mr. André Previn of the London Symphony Orchestra.”
Whittaker smiled. “Mr. Previn could not tell me anything I do not already know, Mr. Egorkin. No one doubts your standing in the world of music, but it is the broader political picture that we have to consider in a case like this. I’m afraid it will take some time and I can by no means guarantee the outcome.”
“We don’t have no time,” Egorkin replied. It wasn’t quite English but the sense was plain enough. The violinist had appeared behind him, watching the discussion with blank incomprehension. “Now we have gone and they will be looking for us. We have made our move, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, and it is your duty to protect us.”
Eric inclined his head, as though acknowledging applause. “So what I suggest is that you remain here—if that is all right with Mr. Wareham—and keep strictly out of sight. And in the meanwhile, I will expedite my inquiries on your behalf.” He had the unnerving ability to talk in the language of official memos and draft accords. “For the moment you are on embassy property, which gives you a degree of security, exactly as though you were in the embassy itself. The local authorities may not enter the embassy or any of its official properties such as Mr. Wareham’s apartment under any circumstances without the express permission of the ambassador. However, given the circumstances, and should they demand it, we might find it necessary to hand you over to representatives of the host country.”
Egorkin shook his head. “It is not the Czechs I have to worry about. It is my own countrymen. Let me assure you that if the KGB discover we are here, they will take no notice of diplomatic property or the status of this apartment. They will break in, take us both and that will be the end of it.” He seemed about to add something, then thought better of it and remained silent.
“In that case, I am afraid there would be little we could do beyond express our outrage through the official channels. But let’s hope that you remain hidden and nothing untoward occurs.”
With that Whittaker excused himself, leaving nothing behind him but the vague words expressed and equally vague hopes invoked. Sam ushered the guests back into their room, trying to reassure them. “We’ll sort things out,” he insisted. “In the worst case, I’ll drive you to the border myself.”
Back in the bedroom Lenka was getting dressed—shorts, a battered old shirt, walking boots. There was some plan to meet up with Jitka and her husband, to get out of the city to go hiking. Very Czech. An overnight stay at some place that she wanted to show him, an old castle or something. And those two English kids they seemed to have adopted, they’d be coming along. But now he’d have to remain behind, to keep watch over the Russians.
Couldn’t they go somewhere else? Lenka suggested. The embassy? Why here? Why disturb our lives? For the first time she sounded petulant and proprietorial, as though possessing rights of ownership over Sam, his flat and his life.
“I’m sorry but that’s not possible. I’m afraid you’ll have to go by yourself, Lenička.”
“You never wanted to go anyway, did you?” she said.
“Of course I did.”
“No, you did not.”
“I did. Really.” One of those stupid arguments that come out of nowhere, a storm on a summer’s day. And to make matters worse, he had to get her help doing some shopping. Food and cigarettes of course, but Egorkin and Nadezhda Pankova needed other things—clothes, toiletries, even reading material. Could she help him get some items? A couple of pairs of knickers, a bra, a couple of blouses, anything you might need for a weekend away. And some sanitary towels.
They drove round to the nearest Tuzex and shopped bad-temperedly for the various items like a long-married couple.
“They won’t fit you,” the saleswoman said, holding a pair of knickers and looking Lenka up and down.
“They’re not for me,” she snapped back, as though she were being forced to shop for her husband’s mistress.
Sam drove her round to the railway station and left her with all the usual admonishments: “Give Jitka and, what’s his name—Zdeněk? Give them my regards. And tell them next time for sure. And Lenička—”
“Yes?”
“Not a word to anyone about our guests. Please remember. No one must know. For their own sakes.”
“So what do I say?”
“Something came up, that’s all you have to say. The embassy, work. They’ll understand. But nothing more. Absolutely nothing more.”
She walked away towards the station entrance. As he watched her go, he felt the anxiety of separation like something tearing deep inside. Never with Stephanie, never that deep, organic pain. For a moment he contemplated the possibility of getting out of the car and running after her, but then he dismissed the idea, shoved the car into gear and drove away.
VIII
36
The main Prague railway station, echoing to the sound of trains and people. They push and shove to get onto the train and keep up with the others. The entire youth of the city seems to be here, crowding onto these carriages at this moment, although Jitka says that they are already late, that they should have been on one of the earliest out of the station—that way you can get into the countryside when it is still fresh from the overnight
cool. But Lenka has only just joined them, apologizing for being late. She had some shopping to do. “Samuel cannot make it,” is all she says by way of explanation for his absence.
They crowd into a compartment where four of the places are already taken. Jitka has to sit on Zdeněk’s lap and the rucksacks are piled in anyhow, some on the overhead luggage racks, others on James’s lap. There is laughter, some broken English, much splintered Czech. Jitka has brought her violin; her husband has a guitar which he holds across Jitka’s front and manages to pick at while she laughs and wriggles. The train slides out of the station and traipses through the Prague suburbs. Lenka sits opposite James, a hint of anger lying behind her smile. She’s wearing shorts like something out of the army, except these shorts were probably hers when she was a thirteen-year-old and went on camping trips with the Pioneers or whatever, so they are disturbingly tight, folded in at her crotch in ways he can barely comprehend. And her legs. Blonde, strong, dusted with golden hairs that catch the light from the window as the train rounds a cliff above the river and the sun glares in at their crowded compartment for a moment. He hopes she doesn’t notice his eyes straying down there, but probably she does. You notice the direction of people’s eyeline, don’t you? Exactly where they’re looking, precisely where their glance strays, to the nearest millimeter.
What does she see in that diplomat bloke? What’s he got that James Borthwick doesn’t have?
Almost everything, including her.
Anyway, thank God he’s not here.
Jitka is still full of the wonders of the concert, the thrill of working with Gennady Egorkin and the brilliance of Pankova’s violin-playing. And Eckstein, of course, but the whole world already knows Birgit Eckstein.
“I didn’t,” says James, and they laugh.
The conversation slips back into Czech for Zdeněk’s sake. But he’s reading the newspaper—RUDÉ PRÁVO the masthead announces—leafing through the pages, throwing out critical comments here and there. He says something that includes the musicians’ names, Gennady Egorkin and Nadezhda Pankova. Jitka translates: “It says the couple have disappeared from their hotel and no one knows where they are.”
Zdeněk adds something. Jitka protests. “He says the man is doing indecent things with his violinist. He says all violinists are like that.” She blushes. “Which is not true.”
The train trundles on, through the countryside now—fields, farms, forest, glimpses of a river through the trees. They finally leave it at a halt somewhere on the edge of a small town whose name seems impossible to pronounce, all consonants and no vowels.
The group sets off down a rough lane and into the woods. It’s like a childhood adventure, walking in the forest, along paths that are hard to follow, in directions that James can’t understand. And it is quite unlike anything in Britain, where almost always you walk and climb in open country, on the fells, on the moors, on the bareback mountains; but here there are miles and miles of forest, holding in their shadows something Slavic, something mysterious and mythic, echoing with birdsong as though it’s a cathedral dedicated to some ancient sylvan deity.
They walk on, talking, laughing, occasionally diverting from the path to forage for berries or mushrooms. These are city people suddenly revealed in different guise, in foresters’ garb, at ease in this strange world that seems so distant from the city. Above all, Zdeněk appears truly at home here, identifying plants and mushrooms, pausing to listen and point as, silently, deer cross their path like shadows in the half-light beneath the canopy of leaves. He smells the scent of a fox, points to cones gnawed down by squirrels, shows where boar have been rooting, identifies polecat droppings. There’s an unreal quality to the whole expedition, going from a place Ellie and James have never heard of to a place they don’t know, that is spoken of only in vague, allusive terms by their hosts. You will see. A strange place. An old ruin. A place whose name, if it has a name, is uncertain. We just call it Hrádek.
It isn’t long before they break out of the trees onto a bare promontory and there it is, Hrádek, which means little castle, and that is what it is, the mere bones of a place, the skeleton of a structure that has long since died—a broken circuit of walls, a tracery of outbuildings, a roofless inner keep and a shattered tower. A metal notice, peppered with shot, warns visitors—Pozor!—of unspecified danger. Far below the battlements a river winds through a narrow gorge. And beyond that is a view, a sudden, startling view of miles and miles of wooded hills running away to the east. How far does it go? Because it seems endless, this procession of forest, as though it will not end until it has become other places whose names James barely knows—the Tatra, the Carpathians, the great Russian steppe, the Urals. He thinks of the Pennines rising up behind his hometown. How small they seem in memory.
The group sits for a while in the afternoon sun, amongst the ruins of a castle that once belonged to a Boleslav or a Vladislav, Duke of Bohemia, listening to birdsong and the soft movement of the breeze through the trees. Zdeněk sits apart, his face without expression. Jitka is her usual animated self, like a small, sleek rodent. Occasionally she looks directly at James for a moment longer than one might expect. He remembers the touch of her mouth when they were dancing and wonders whether she remembers too, and if she does what she thinks about it. Ellie sits beside Lenka, who is cool and distant.
“This is very kind of you,” Ellie tells her. “To bring us with you. It’s lovely here.”
Lenka’s smile is tired, as though there are other things on her mind. “It is Čechy. What you call Bohemia. It is right that you see it. Everything is not Prague.” And then she does what to James seems a curious thing: she puts her arm round Ellie. And Ellie moves towards her, puts her head on Lenka’s shoulder, seems, for that moment in the sun, a close friend. Perhaps more. Is that the kind of friendship that women may have and he has never understood? A kind of idyll. Manet might have painted it, or one of the Impressionists. The viewer might ponder the relationship between the various figures, the two men sitting apart, a dark girl who moves between them, laughing at something, two women who sit together, one with her arm round the other.
The tableau is soon broken by the arrival of others on the scene, three men and a woman who come blundering through the trees and are greeted with cries of surprise and delight, as though their coming had not been planned. There are introductions, a bit of fractured English. Lenka translates: these are old friends of Zdeněk and Jitka, childhood friends of Zdeněk, in fact. It is a kind of tradition for them to gather here at the Hrádek in August, something they started years ago when they were all at the local school and have kept up ever since. So for a while the castle is theirs. They gather wood and make a fire against the wall of the inner keep where the stones are soot-blackened beneath the shaft of an ancient chimney. They forage for mushrooms, with Zdeněk’s friends showing remarkable mycological knowledge. And then, as the sun goes down and the evening sets in, they cook sausages and bake potatoes and open the beer that everyone has brought. Afterwards they sing songs round the campfire like an advertisement for the Boy Scouts from the 1930s, Zdeněk and Jitka playing guitar and violin. Some of the music is familiar—American folk songs, Peter, Paul and Mary stuff with a bit of Joan Baez thrown in—but some is quite foreign to Ellie and James. Zdeněk strums the guitar well enough, but it is Jitka’s playing that captivates, the classical violinist transfigured by the flicker of her bow and the shadows of the castle ruins and the uncertain firelight into something elemental—as though she has been revealed in her true form, which is Romany, Gypsy, Cikánka.
One of Zdeněk’s friends—James has forgotten the names—has a bottle of slivovice which he passes round. Cigarettes are lit; someone rolls a joint, about which there’s a heated discussion between the girl and one of the boys. But still the joint goes round while Zdeněk strums his guitar and Jitka sings now about going to San Francisco and being sure to wear some flowers in your hair, which James has always thought a bloody silly idea but which appeals to h
im at this moment, especially as when she has finished singing she comes over and sits close to him on the edge of the shadows round the fire, close enough to touch, shoulder to shoulder. He can smell her in the cooling air, the heat of her, her faint, tart scent.
“I was in San Francisco,” she tells him, as if that somehow justifies the song. “With the youth orchestra. It is an interesting place.” Her husband and two friends are singing some kind of comic, call-and-response song. Everyone laughs. The joke is plainly that everyone knows the joke in advance.
“Why did you come back?” James asks. “Why didn’t you stay there?”
In the darkness he can see the gleam of her teeth as she smiles. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“There must be a reason.”
“Reasons, many of them. Because of Zdeněk. Because things were changing here. Because I missed my home. All those reasons. Anyway, my scholarship was for six months, so when it finished I just came back.”
Lenka is trying to teach Ellie the words of the song. Words without comprehension, an eternal problem. They laugh over the difficulties.
“And now?”
“Now I am trapped.”
* * *
The fire burns down, the singing becomes sporadic. Mummified in sleeping bags they lie down amongst the castle ruins, Ellie beside Lenka, talking with her in the dark, a soft, earnest sound. James wanders away, round one of the walls, feeling detached from the expedition, indifferent to Ellie, thoughtful about Jitka. He finds his place away from the others, out of mind. The moon, a half-moon, is rising above distant trees. Shadows shift in the darkness. A darker shadow comes round the end of the wall and coalesces above him.