Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “Have you, indeed? That’s a good thing. Clean as a whistle, I expect. But still, you don’t want to let her take your eye off the ball.” He looked faintly embarrassed. “If you see what I mean.”

  “Of course I won’t. But as a matter of fact, I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

  For a moment the ambassador looked startled. “Good lord.” Then diplomacy papered over the surprise with a broad smile, as though the idea of marriage changed the whole complexion of the affair. A bit of casual sex with a local girl was suddenly transformed into an aspect of statecraft. “Oh, that’s wonderful news, Sam. Wonderful.”

  “For your ears only at the moment, sir. I haven’t even asked the lady yet.”

  Suddenly all smiles, the ambassador came round the desk with his hand outstretched. “I must congratulate you, Sam.” Angling metaphors replaced cricket metaphors with noteworthy fluency. “I’m sure you’ll land the catch successfully, old fellow. Let me know when you’ve popped the question and we can celebrate properly. Meanwhile, what about a glass of sherry?”

  “That’s very kind, sir. A small one.”

  The ambassador busied himself with decanter and glasses at a side table. He’d got an amontillado or a fino. Which would Sam prefer? Had them shipped out by Berry Bros. & Rudd. Cut glass—Bohemian, of course—and amber liquid. They sipped.

  “Now tell me about the girl. She seems quite a force of nature. I gather her father was a victim of the show trials.”

  “Yes, he was. Lukáš Vadinský.”

  “So I gathered. Can’t have been easy for her.”

  “She’s certainly had a pretty hard time of it. Only got to university by taking her mother’s maiden name. She’s still a student but she also does some journalism. A bit of radio as well.”

  “You must bring her round to the residence to meet Margaret.” He frowned. “She does speak English, doesn’t she?”

  “Very well.”

  Relief. “Good for her. And good for you, old chap. And good to know that in these troubled times it’s still matters of the heart that rule.”

  * * *

  Sam returned to his office feeling that some kind of victory had been achieved, a diplomatic coup without having had to marshal arguments to support it. But marriage to Lenka? He’d voiced the idea before he’d even thought about it. Did that mean the idea had already been there, lurking beneath the level of the conscious? So did he mean it? And if he did mean it and if he were to ask her, what the devil would she say? The phone rang. It was somebody from the consular department with some damn-fool story about a TV program they were making on the Charles Bridge—a British pop group or something. Was he interested in watching? This afternoon. The Moody Blues. He recalled that Lenka had already mentioned it. She knew someone in television who was organizing it. Was he interested in taking part? Of course he wasn’t.

  “Of course I’m not,” he told the person from the consular department. “Isn’t it economic affairs? Exporting British pop music to the world, or something?”

  Then a messenger came in from communications with a telex from London that had just come through, something about a report of troops being moved up to the East German–Czech border. Did the embassy have any confirmation of this?

  He sighed. There had been reports of troop movements both inside and outside the country ever since the spring maneuvers. Half the bloody Warsaw Pact had been sniffing round Czechoslovakia for months now, like dogs round a bitch’s arse. He passed the telex on to Eric Whittaker, along with a suggested anodyne response that mentioned neither dogs nor bitches. Then he went through whatever else there was on his desk and closed down for the day. He was taking Lenka out for dinner, to the restaurant overlooking the river at Barrandov where they had had lunch on their first date. There was a certain tension between them over the Russians and over that weekend jaunt to the castle that he’d been forced to miss. He’d make it up to her, tell her that he loved her. Maybe, if things went well, he’d even propose to her. The idea shocked him. Could you shock yourself? Apparently it was possible. Mrs. Lenka Wareham. How did that sound? Of course, here she’d become Paní Lenka Warehamová or something equally hideous. But it wouldn’t be here, would it? It’d be a posting to somewhere undistinguished, as a counsellor probably; or if he got lucky, something good for the curriculum vitae, such as Washington or Paris. Moscow would be the obvious one, with his knowledge of the language, but surely they’d not post him to Moscow with a citizen of a Soviet Bloc country in tow.

  Was this all nothing more than idle daydreaming brought unexpectedly out into the open when confronted by the ambassador’s inquiries? Perhaps. But the idea had brought with it a strange, physical sensation, a blend of warmth and contentment and blatant sexual arousal. Mrs. Lenka Wareham.

  42

  A pop group on the Charles Bridge. There’s something feminine about them, something effete. Long, waved hair. Blouses with puffed sleeves. Skintight trousers. They call themselves The Moody Blues and are the soft side of the hippy craze, come across the Iron Curtain to bring some glimmer of psychedelic beat music to the benighted inhabitants of the Soviet empire. Television cameras peer at them while a dapper little man bobs around with a microphone, telling people in French where to go and what to say. No one understands. He slips into German, which everyone pretends not to understand either. Someone from Czech television translates and the technicians do more or less what is asked of them as though it was obvious from the beginning if only he’d said. The audience—a gaggle of girls in short skirts and beehive hairdos, boys in jeans and open-necked white shirts—sit along the parapet of the bridge trying not to look bored. This is television, this is exciting. They clap because someone tells them to and the anchorman explains to an imaginary audience that nous sommes sur le très très vieux pont Charles. Die schönen Karlsbrücke, he adds for an imaginary German audience. “Who is your spokesman?” he asks, in English now, of the hapless musicians. He pushes a microphone in the face of the volunteer. “How do you depict your musical style?”

  The musician looks perplexed. What to say? “Well, it’s still beat,” he decides. “But the way it’s progressing now, it’s getting very classical.”

  The anchorman translates these gnomic words into French and then German. The song they are about to sing is well known to all aficionados of such music, and the artificial audience clap once again as though having something to do has at least aroused them from their summer torpor. The members of the group begin to strum dead guitars, finger a dumb keyboard and tap a muted drum kit while a recording of their number comes out over a pair of speakers so they can pretend to sing. “Knights in White Satin” is the title. James imagines Lancelot and Guinevere, in white satin both of them, just the kind of image conjured up by the fantasy worlds of Camelot and Jesus Christ Superstar.

  Ellie giggles. “It’s night-time, you idiot, not men in suits of armor, nights in white satin sheets.”

  For a moment they’re reunited in barely suppressed laughter. Lenka looks at them askance, in case their noise intrudes on the soundtrack. She has arranged their presence there, through someone she knows in TV, so she feels responsible for their behavior. But their laughter doesn’t intrude on the soundtrack because the whole thing will be dubbed over later in the studios in Paris.

  The song, vaguely mysterious, vaguely evocative, seeps into the hot afternoon air. Whatever their merits, James thinks, The Moody Blues are not the Ides of March.

  43

  Dinner on the terraces at Barrandov, in the humid evening. The darkness was punctuated by candlelight and laughter, as though there was not a care in the world. A jazz quartet played “Take Five,” the saxophone wandering off into the vagaries of improvisation.

  “One thing about Prague,” Sam said. “You can always guarantee the music.”

  Lenka smiled. “Every Czech a musician. That’s what they say.”

  They talked about the weekend, his imprisonment in the flat with Egorkin and the violinist, her tr
ek with Jitka and the others out to the hrádek. “It was fun. The girl, Ellie. I like her.” She added, still with a hint of accusation in her tone: “Perhaps you should have been there.”

  “I’m afraid my life is like that. The unexpected happens all the time.”

  “If it’s all the time, it’s not unexpected, is it?”

  One of her sharp retorts that he still could not fathom. He wondered whether and how he should pose the question. Confessions of love did not come easily to him, perhaps because love, promising so much yet threatening disaster, seemed the very antithesis of diplomacy. Feeling something akin to panic, he reached across the table to take her hand just as “Take Five” came to a thoughtful end and the quartet segued into some Miles Davis. People got up to dance. Lenka too, taking Sam with her. She was strong and sinuous, drifting softly to the music, molding her shape to his. “What,” she whispered in his ear, “do you want?”

  And so, dancing slowly on the Barrandov Terraces in the warm evening, he told her. And for a while—that dance, her whispered reply, the rest of the evening together—happiness seemed possible.

  * * *

  He woke from nightmare into nightmare. Lenka slept undisturbed beside him, breathing softly. For a while he lay on the borderline between the two states, between the sleeping nightmare and the waking nightmare, the dream fading from his memory to leave only a vague sense of dread and the ringing of the telephone that didn’t fade. He fumbled in the dark for his watch and read the luminous hands. One-thirty.

  The phone continued to ring.

  No good ever came from a telephone call in the middle of the night. He thought of his parents. He thought of Steffie. What had happened and what might have happened. There was the temptation to ignore the damn thing and return to sleep, but the ringing continued and now there was the sound of aircraft, unusual in the night. The whine of turboprops. The roar of jets.

  Lenka’s voice in the darkness: “What is it?”

  “Planes. The phone.”

  The fragmentary nature of disaster—a telephone ringing; the sounds of planes in the night sky; a sense of unreality. Surely this was a dream of some kind, a phantom created at the edge of sleep? Then came a flutter of panic at the knowledge that it wasn’t a dream, that nightmare had turned real, like a fog freezing into hard black ice. The Russian winter. The phone was still ringing and he stumbled out into the hall to pick it up. A bleak voice on the other end of the line said, “It’s Eric.” There was a moment’s bleeping and whirring on the line and then Eric’s voice continued: “…should be here in a couple of hours,” it was saying.

  “Who’ll be here? I missed what you just said.”

  “Who the fuck do you think? Ivan the Terrible. The fucking Red Army. The duty officer’s just phoned me. It seems they’re all over the airport. The main force crossed the Polish and East German borders just before midnight. They’ll be with us any time now.”

  Sam took a deep breath, as though he might stop the hope draining out of him. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. What sort of stupid question is that? President Svoboda has issued a statement telling the Czech armed forces to remain in barracks and show no resistance. We’re calling all diplomatic staff into the embassy, Sam. Can you come round as soon as possible? There are new chaps on the gate, so make sure you’ve got your papers. At least there’ll not be a Hungary if the Czech army units do what they’re told. But still, be careful in the street.”

  “I’ll try, Eric.”

  “You’ll succeed, old fellow. But you’ll have to leave your guests for now. We’ll have to work something out later. Just get them to keep their heads below the parapet for the moment. Oh, and…damn, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten her name. Your girl.”

  “Lenka. What about her?”

  “Is she with you? You see, it seems they’re keeping their own nationals from seeking refuge in foreign embassies. They must have been planning this for months. Why the hell didn’t we know? Anyway, the point is, you can’t bring her with you, Sam. They won’t let her through. Sorry about that, but that’s how it is, old chap. Look, I must go. Place is in an uproar.”

  Sam put the phone down and stood for a while, not knowing what to think, not even knowing how to think. He went back to the bedroom. Lenka was sitting up in bed, prepared for disaster, her face sketched in chalk against the dark frame of the headboard. “What is it?”

  “They’re invading,” he told her. No need to say who.

  She got out of bed and began to pull on her clothes. “The radio, turn on the radio.”

  He fiddled with the tuning to find the state radio. Recorded music was playing, the Czechoslovak national anthem, which was the separate Czech and Slovak anthems jammed untidily together just like the country itself. And then the music ceased and there was an announcement in solemn tones addressed “To all people of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”

  Lenka stood still, her jeans pulled halfway up.

  On Tuesday, August 20, 1968, at approximately 11 p.m. the armies of the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic and the Bulgarian People’s Republic crossed—

  Then the thing went silent. Just the rush of static. He looked round. Lenka pulled her jeans up and fastened them, then grabbed an old shirt, yesterday’s shirt, the first thing to hand. “That was Vladimír Fišer,” she said. “I know his voice, I know him. Try another frequency.”

  He turned the tuning knob, but there was nothing from any of the state radio frequencies, only at 210 meters a different voice announcing Radio Vltava and explaining that “personalities of the Czechoslovak Communist Party requested military aid from the Soviet Union because our republic was threatened by counterrevolution and anti-socialist elements…”

  “Radio Vltava? I’ve never heard of it. And the voice—it’s not Czech, not native, I mean. It’s Russian or Ukrainian, something like that.” Lenka’s tone was contemptuous, but there was despair in her eyes like the first symptoms of a terminal disease. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she said, as though, hope against hope, it might have been a gigantic hoax. “Are they here already?”

  “Apparently some units have already landed at the airport.”

  “What will happen?”

  “You’re asking questions that I can’t answer.”

  “Will there be fighting?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. What would be the point? Eric—that was Eric Whittaker on the phone—says that Svoboda has called for the army not to resist, but maybe some hotheads—”

  Sam went through into the sitting room and opened the curtains a fraction. The tiny square outside was barely illuminated by a single streetlamp, just enough to show a lone car parked there, a black Tatra lying like a shark in the depths of a pool. He went back to Lenka. “They want me at the embassy.”

  Then he went to the spare room and knocked on the door. There was movement inside, hurried whispering and a call to come in. Egorkin was sitting on the side of the bed in pajamas. Nadia had the sheet drawn up to her chin, looking wide-eyed. “What’s happening?” Egorkin asked.

  “Your lot are invading the country, that’s what’s happening.” For a moment he felt anger. It was an untidy emotion that could encompass almost anything, even Egorkin and his woman. But the Russian seemed confused, as though the whole world was suddenly not working to his command. “What will happen now?”

  “God knows. For the moment you’d better just stay as you are. I have to report to the embassy.”

  “Will this mean war?”

  “Of course it won’t. No NATO country is involved. It’ll be treated as an internal affair of the Soviet Bloc.”

  “And what about us? What about me and Nadezhda Nikolayevna? Your people will say, we don’t want to be making trouble with the Soviets at this delicate moment, so get rid of them. Let them—what is the English expression?—stew in their own juice, is that it?”

  Sam drew a calming breath.
The instinct of a diplomat: think before you argue; never commit to anything you cannot deliver; choose, out of the large range of evasive expressions at your disposal, the appropriate one. Not exactly what he has done in his private life. “That remains to be seen. For the moment, may I suggest you are even more careful than before about keeping quiet? We are being watched outside and apparently they’ve tightened things up at all embassies. It is in your best interests to keep as low a profile as possible.”

  Low profile. A good phrase just then starting to worm its way into the lexicon of the diplomatic world.

  “I will,” he assured the Russian pair, “keep you informed.”

  * * *

  While Sam showered and shaved, Lenka spent most of the time on the phone—someone she knew in radio, her mother, Jitka, other friends. The phones were still working, which seemed a miracle, and rumor diffused through the wires faster than if it were shouted from the rooftops: the airport had been occupied, tanks were on the move from Hungary, from Ukraine, from East Germany; the country was being crushed in the jaws of the Russian bear just as it was crushed in the jaws of the German wolf thirty years ago.

  There’s a pattern in Czechoslovak history: 1918, 1938, 1948, 1968.

  The phone rang again and once again it was Eric wondering where the hell he was.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming. I’ve got to sort things out here first.” He turned to Lenka, knowing there was no point in trying to keep her there. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll try and find Jitka. Find out what’s happening. Maybe go to the radio station, I don’t really know.”

  “Listen.” Sam wanted to keep her for a moment longer. “How will we keep in touch?”

  “I’ll phone.”

  “I’ll probably be at the embassy.”

  “If you want to find me you can try Jitka’s. You have her number?” Hastily she scribbled it and the address on a scrap of paper beside the telephone. Then they embraced, wordlessly, except that he said, “Be careful,” that useless advice you give people when you don’t know what else to say. And then she had gone, closing the front door behind her, her footsteps sounding on the stairs as she ran down. He went to the window to see that she was safely past the Tatra and part of him hoped that she might look up and see him watching her, wanting to watch over her but helpless to do anything. She didn’t. She passed the car unimpeded and turned the corner that led to the bridge and went out of sight.