by Simon Mawer
The official didn’t smile back, for this was plainly not a smiling matter. The fraternal allies were here to protect the embassy from counterrevolutionary troublemakers.
“But there are no counterrevolutionary troublemakers,” Sam said, looking round as though curious to see if counterrevolutionary troublemakers were skulking around the nearest corner.
“That shows how efficient our fraternal allies are.”
It sounded like the punchline to a joke. There followed a moment of stasis, each waiting for the other to make the next move. Sam offered a cigarette and waited for the moment of temptation—he could see it in the other man’s eyes—to pass and the offer to be declined. “Look, my ambassador’s on my back,” he said, in a confidential tone that suggested they both knew what a pain in the arse such senior people could be. “Couldn’t you just move round the corner, out of sight? The guards could be here, of course. Just move the vehicle.”
The man’s expression did not change. “We have our orders. They”—he meant the Russians—”have their orders. Your ambassador will have to talk to the relevant authority.”
Sam nodded. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Who exactly is the relevant authority at the moment?”
He glanced regretfully at the packet of cigarettes, slipped it back into his pocket and turned to walk back to the relative security of Her Majesty’s domain, all the while conscious of eyes and assault rifles leveled at him. Back inside the fortress of the British embassy he looked in at Whittaker’s office. “The Russians aren’t going anywhere for the moment, Eric. Sorry about that.”
Whittaker looked resigned. “We made the effort.”
Sam went back to his own desk. Through the window he could see smoke rising over the Old Town, in the area of Wenceslas Square. That’s where the radio reports were originating, in the street behind the National Museum, with the sound of gunfire coming across the transmission as background to the announcer’s voice. Was Lenka there? The agony of uncertainty, of hope pitched against likelihood. She’d be there, in the thick of things. He tried to recall the moment of her leaving. How had the mood been? What had been said? Not just the words but the emotions that informed them. But memory was a deceptive thing, an unreliable witness.
He picked up the phone again and rang the flat. The two guests sounded more or less all right. They wanted to know what was going on but he couldn’t give them much information. The Red Army is occupying the city. That was about it. And what should they do? Just sit tight.
He put the phone down and went back to drafting the report for Eric to send to London. It was a chaos of changing news and unconfirmed rumor. One of his contacts said Dubček and his lieutenants had been arrested. Another report even said they’d already been spirited out of the country. Yet the National Assembly was in continuous session and the radio was broadcasting Dubček’s words appealing for people to go to work as normal. And the president? The old man, silver-haired and pink-faced, a general who had fought alongside the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War, had delivered an address over the radio calling on his fellow citizens to show calm and dignity. “A complicated situation has arisen in our country,” he had told them with magnificent understatement.
Sam came to some sort of conclusion, took the draft report to Whittaker’s office and handed it over. “That’s as good as I can manage for now, Eric. If you don’t send it in the next half-hour it’ll be out of date. Now I think I’ll go out for a while, if you don’t mind.”
Whittaker looked startled. “Out? But I need you here.”
“I’ve spent most of the time listening to the radio and the rest trying to ring people who won’t answer the phone. Anyone can do that. I’d be better employed finding out what’s really going on.”
“Well for God’s sake be careful. We don’t want a diplomatic incident to go with the rest of the mess.”
* * *
He walked out of the embassy and down towards the armored car at the end of the cul-de-sac. Was there a flicker of recognition from the soldiers as he edged past? Probably not. He dropped by his flat to see how the musicians were doing and found them in the sitting room with the television on with the sound turned down, and the radio tuned to the BBC World Service. They had the look of refugees in the middle of a war, sheltering from the bombs, fearful of rape and murder.
“What’s happening?” Egorkin asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Nadia seemed to have been crying. She shook her head in disbelief as images flickered across the television screen of civilians throwing stones at tanks. “It is terrible,” she kept repeating. “Just terrible.”
Egorkin said, “The phone has been ringing, but I didn’t answer it.” His expression was anxious, as though he hoped to curry favor.
Sam closed his eyes in something like despair. “It might have been important.”
“But then they might know we’re here.”
Anger flared. Sam almost shouted, almost lost his temper. No one gives a fuck about you now! he almost yelled. Instead he said, “You’re right,” and picked up the phone to dial Jitka’s number. The only lifeline he had. But the phone at the other end just rang and rang in an empty flat that he couldn’t picture.
46
They climb the stairs, out of the noise and confusion and fear of the streets. Somewhere above them a phone is ringing. Is it Jitka’s? But as they pass the floors it stops, and when they reach the flat it is a haven of peace and quiet with only the distant sound of a siren breaking the calm. They close the door behind them and turn the key. Through one of the dormer windows James can see smoke rising over the roofs. He and Ellie don’t discuss what to do. Somehow it has been decided by a kind of communication that operates beneath the level of conscious thought. She begins packing her things away, rolling up her sleeping bag, collecting her stuff from the bathroom, while he rings the embassy and asks to speak to Mr. Wareham. In placid tones—the British in a crisis—an embassy voice asks if he is seeking consular advice, in which case he should phone the consulate on—
“I don’t want the consulate. I want to speak directly to Mr. Wareham. Samuel Wareham,” he adds, suddenly remembering the posh guy’s first name. “My name’s James Borthwick. Tell him Lenka told me to contact him. It’s about her.”
There’s a moment’s hesitation. He can sense the operator wondering about the importance or otherwise of this unknown voice with its Northern accent. “Hold the line please.” There’s a pause. Silence on the line, just the rush of static in the earphone. Then the sound of the operator again. “I’m afraid Mr. Wareham is unavailable at the moment. May I take a message?”
47
At the entrance to the Charles Bridge there was a Russian checkpoint. Only the day before TV crews had been filming that British pop group, with everyone basking in the fiction that the country was in the process of joining Western pop culture; now half a dozen Russian soldiers were rifling people’s bags and searching them for offensive items. But the procedure was less to do with security, more plain highway robbery: they were taking cameras, pens, wristwatches, anything that might have pecuniary value. A young soldier—a mere boy—advanced on Sam as he moved to go through. Sam waved his diplomatic pass. “Britanskoye posol’stvo,” he said. British embassy. The soldier hesitated. Standing downwind of him Sam caught the sour scent of stale sweat. There was a brief conversation between the soldier and his officer before Sam was waved through onto the bridge.
The bridge itself was already daubed with graffiti. Red stars and black swastikas in intimate conjunction, BREZHNEV = HITLER chalked on the parapet in case you’d missed the point. In one place a Cyrillic scrawl exhorted the Russians to GO HOME! On either side of the bridge the embankments had become a tank park, Soviet armor lying like a great, articulated reptile alongside the water’s edge. Gunfire punctuated the morning, while from the crowded buildings of the Old Town came a noise like the roar of a football crowd. Sam went on, past the statue of the e
mperor Charles IV, hung now with a Czechoslovak flag, past the incurious gaze of soldiers, towards whatever was happening in the heart of the city. The streets, the squares were rancid with the smell of the occupiers—diesel fumes, hot metal, unwashed bodies. The act of walking, hurrying, almost running, distracted him from his feelings, which were visceral, a sensation of vomit, a feeling of fear lying just below the sternum and spreading up the spine to his brain.
* * *
Memories of that walk became confused in retrospect, so that he could no longer plot the exact route he took through the streets of the Old Town. There was the incongruity of tanks in narrow streets, of armored vehicles confronting trams, of soldiers ringed by arguing men and women. Roads were blocked. Trams tipped over as barricades. A bus driven into a shop front. Smoke and dust eddying in the narrow spaces. Groups of youths waved banners while a motorbike drove past distributing copies of Rudé Právo. Bullets pockmarked buildings. Façades were smashed and broken stonework lay on the pavements. The National Museum at the head of Wenceslas Square, dark gray with urban soot, bore white spots where shells had hit. On Vinohradská there was a litter of overturned vehicles blocking access to the radio station. Tanks had ground their way through the debris, spewing clouds of exhaust fumes. Guns fired. Boys argued with tanks. Flags waved. Girls screamed.
At one street corner an argument was going on between a dozen youths and a young Russian officer. Their common language was an amalgam of Czech and Russian. “What are you doing here?”
“We came to help.”
“We don’t need your help. You can see that. So go back home.”
“We were invited.”
“By whom? Not by the people.”
“By your leaders.”
“Dubček didn’t invite you. Císař didn’t invite you. Svoboda didn’t invite you. So what are you doing here?”
“We came to help.”
So it went on, a circular litany with no end in sight.
As he stood in the midst of this chaos, Sam’s fear gave way to a curious sense of detachment, as though the ferment all around were happening in some other, parallel world. These tanks, these soldiers, the blunt fact of their presence had all been inevitable. What had people expected? What had Lenka and her friends, with their fifteen minutes of freedom, imagined would happen? This was reality. The last eight months had been but a dream.
A group of protesters walked past chanting Dubček’s name. They parted and flowed round him like water round an obstacle, like the river that had flowed round Lenka as she stood there in the stream. A gunshot rang out. People flinched and scattered, but Sam had learned from his national service basic training that you never hear the report of the shot that hits you, so that particular bullet, echoing between the buildings, was safe for him at least. He had never felt so indifferent to risk.
He walked on. The steel rasp of tank tracks ground paving stones to dust. Sunlight through smoke. The smell of oil. A fire blazed beneath an armored car while the crew tried to beat out the flames, just as people would try to beat out the flames of Jan Palach’s body in five months’ time in more or less the same place. A passing motorcyclist shouted, “Take these!” and thrust a bundle of leaflets at him. He walked on, handing the leaflets out to anyone he passed, not really caring what the leaflet said—the simple act was enough. Was this what combat was like: fear transcended to become something close to euphoria? He came across a young man also distributing leaflets. There was an absurd hiatus during which they compared leaflets and found them to be different. “That’s good, then,” the youth decided. He wore a black leather jacket and jeans. His hair was down to his collar. A badge of some kind. “You German?” he asked.
“English.”
“You speak good Czech.”
A lorry roared past filled with kids yelling and waving the Czechoslovak flag, chanting Dubček, Dubček, Dubček! “Oh, one thing. You don’t know a girl called Konečková, do you? Lenka Konečková?”
A frown. “I’ve heard of her. A journalist?”
“She writes a bit. And speaks on the radio sometimes. Have you seen her?”
The youth shook his head, indicating the chaos all around. “I wouldn’t know her by sight anyway.”
“Blonde, tall.”
The youth laughed. “Aren’t they all?”
Sam walked on, handing people leaflets until his supply vanished. What else to do? On the embankment there were groups of people arguing with the tank crews. Slogans had been chalked on the steel hulls—swastikas, hangmen, the exhortation to “go home” in Russian, in Czech, even, presumably with an eye on the news media, in English.
* * *
“When’s that guy from the embassy going to ring back?”
“Why don’t you ring him again?”
“Because he’s too busy to take my call.”
“You don’t know that.”
“That’s what she said. Anyway, maybe he already knows.”
They have been bickering like this ever since they came back to the flat. What else is there to do? Once it was different. Once there was that mutual attraction of a kind, but it was always a fragile thing, and now they are kept together by no more than the kind of tension that keeps oil droplets together in water—a shared reaction to the unintelligible world around them. Outside in the streets people argue with tanks in a language they cannot comprehend; here in the cramped living room the TV shows a serious young woman talking to the camera in a blizzard of incomprehensible Czech. Whenever the transmission goes off the air, James retunes it to another channel and the picture returns. The announcer appears to be sitting in a room with bare walls, except for the Czechoslovak flag that has been roughly draped behind her. Every now and again she is interrupted by poor-quality film of tanks in the street. A bus lies on its side and one of the tanks goes at it like a petulant child, bashing it again and again, trying to climb over. People jeer from the sidelines. The building beyond the fallen bus has Československý Rozhlas across the front. They wonder whether a figure, caught for an instant on the edge of the picture, is Lenka. They wonder where she is now.
Ellie says, “We can’t just sit here on our bums.”
But James perceives the world differently. On his bum is precisely where he wants to be. He has a headache and his right ear is still singing from the crack of the bullet that almost killed him. Sounds are muffled on that side, as though he might have a perforated eardrum. It’s like observing the world from inside a glass tank, sounds coming to him deadened and occluded. “The embassy said stay put.” He puts on an exaggerated accent, like the Queen doing her Christmas broadcast. “We are recommending all British citizens remain indoors if they possibly can. We will inform you of developments as soon as we are able.”
“Well you can stay if you like. But I want a breath of fresh air.” She gets up decisively.
“Don’t be stupid, Ellie. You can’t go out by yourself.”
They argue about that, too. Why can’t she go out? He could if he wished. Girls against boys. But he won’t go with her because he’s got this ringing in his ear and this ache in his head and because he’s bloody well going to wait in the flat until either Jitka or Zdeněk come back to tell them what the fuck is happening, or that guy from the embassy phones.
“You’re frightened.”
“Of course I’m fucking frightened. I’ve seen Lenka shot—”
“We don’t know that.”
“—and I nearly had my own head blown off.”
“Well we’ve got to get something to eat. There’s that shop just round the corner. Potraviny or something. We can try there. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
While they’re arguing the phone rings. James picks it up gingerly, expecting more incomprehensible jabbering on the other end, but it’s Jitka’s voice that sounds in his ear, his good ear, the one that still works properly. “Is that James? Is Zdeněk there?”
“No, he’s not.” This is the woman who just two days ago let him kiss her o
n the mouth and cup her breast in his hand. He wants to use a term of endearment, to let her understand what he feels for her despite his being entirely unworthy of her interest. But only the banal comes to him: “What’s happening? Where are you?”
“I’m with Lenka. Tell him that. Tell him not to do anything stupid and to come round as soon as he can.” Stoopid. That American intonation to her English. “Have you spoken with Sam at the embassy?”
“I couldn’t get hold of him.”
“Well try again. Tell him about Lenka.”
“What do I tell him? Where are you? Where should I say?”
There is an edge of impatience in her reply. “Na Františku. Didn’t I tell you?”
“What? No, you didn’t.” He scrawls nafrantiskoo on the pad beside the phone, not knowing whether he has got it right or what it means. “Can you repeat that?”
There’s silence on the line.
“Hello? Are you there?”
Her voice comes back. Perhaps the line is faulty. “I thought I told you. I’m sorry, it’s been difficult.”
“People have been ringing but no one spoke English. What did you think you’d already told me?”
“Nemocnice na Františku—it’s the hospital. I thought I already told you. I’ve been ringing round.”
“How is she?”
“I can’t talk now. There are others that want the phone.”
“How is she, Jitka?”
She speaks rapidly, quietly, almost whispering. As though telling it softly might mollify her words. “She’s unconscious. It is not certain. Here it’s chaos, like war zone. I must go.” And the phone goes dead.