The questioning went on and on. A longer discussion in Czech followed amongst his jailers. At the end of it, without meeting his eyes, the uniformed guard brusquely returned his passport. For good measure, he confiscated two of the scientific papers Stephen had picked up in Vienna.
What came next startled Stephen more than any question during his interrogation.
‘The officer has asked whether you might be so kind as to give me a lift into Brno.’ His interrogator said politely. ‘They cannot spare anyone at the moment to take me back.’
Stephen had no choice but nervously to acquiesce.
When they had driven for a mile or two in silence, Stephen was surprised by a burst of gleeful laughter. The sound was so unexpected that he veered the car dangerously toward a ditch.
‘I must apologize for the way I treated you back there. But it was necessary. You will forgive me, no? I did my best not to concentrate on your less scientific material.’
Stephen shot his companion a swift glance. The charming mischievous face that met it bore little relationship to that of his stern interrogator.
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘No, our manners are a little curious at the moment. Our habits, too. You see we live under an army of semantic occupation. We have got used to saying one thing while thinking another.’
Stephen waited in silence, afraid that this show of congeniality might be a ruse.
‘I suspect it was the Polish visa that made them stop you. We are not intended to know about Solidarity, the Polish troubles.’
‘I see.’
‘Still, you will want to understand what I was doing in that frontier post. Well, I was passing my Chief’s office at the hospital just after he had received a call from Professor Klima in Prague. I have English. And I am menial enough to be sent on tedious errands. So I proposed myself as an emissary. I like to propose myself for such duties.’
He winked at Stephen. ‘And the grapevine had already alerted me to your possible arrival. I was hoping we might meet.’
Stephen joined him in laughter.
‘By the way. My name is Jan Martin.’
It was one of several names on the list from Simone that Stephen had memorized.
When they arrived in Brno, it was already evening and Jan urged him to come home with him and accept his hospitality, if he didn’t mind the occasional interruption of a squalling baby. It was not a bad house, he told him, on the outskirts of town, close to the hospital and slightly ramshackle, but they had the advantage of only sharing it with his sister and stepmother, and a reliable couple up stairs.
By that time, Jan had also told him that he had once been to Cambridge with his father, many years back now, when he was still a high-school student. On the cusp of that Spring which had given them so much hope only too quickly to dash it.
A few queries had led Stephen to suspect that he might already know Jan by reputation. As a student, he had heard the head of his lab at Cambridge sing the praises of some mythical youth who had briefly worked there in the late ‘sixties. The story had the form of a trope. It was one of those tales that circulated like legendary material round every laboratory, told of great scientists, who had innate tacit skills, who saw things in slides no one had seen before, or who could grow giant crystals or tumble upon Nobel prizes. This particular tale had it that this youth, a mere stripling of seventeen who had accompanied his father on an exchange visit to the Cambridge Lab had had skills so remarkable that the Professor constantly invoked them in order to chastise his current clumsier or slower researchers.
The years that separated the thirty year old Jan from the seventeen-year old who had grown into a Cambridge legend had not been kind ones. Those who had worked abroad during the brief efflorescence of the Prague Spring had too often returned to Czechoslovakia to find themselves under suspicion, demoted, sent into oblivion or ordered into menial jobs far from their area of expertise.
Scientists on the whole had fared less badly than intellectuals or writers whose forms of communication were easier of access. Jan’s father had been sent off to work in a pathology laboratory in provincial Brno and had died soon afterwards. Jan himself was eventually allowed to continue his studies, but despite his evident brilliance, he was shunted into practical medicine rather than research and had spent long years as a lowly hospital doctor, assigned to the terminal wards which were equally terminal in the matter of research prospects.
It was through Jan that Stephen began to have an intimate insight of what an accident of geography could do to a life.
Only a few years older than him, Jan shared his interest in molecular research and his passion for experiment, yet none of Stephen’s opportunities had been his. In the course of their sporadic late night conversations over the years - about work being done by scientists in Stanford and L.A. and Cambridge, of new discoveries in microbiology, of gene sequencing and the potential of monoclonal antibodies - Stephen also grew shamefully aware that Jan was indeed the potentially legendary figure of his professor’s narrative. But that legend had been nipped in the bud by a politics which had little to do with science.
He began to see Jan as his double, the person he could all too easily have been had chance cut the historical deck differently.
Superstitiously, he began to feel that he owed a debt not only to Jan, but to Eastern Europe as a whole. Began to think that because the East had lived out all the ills of occupation and fractured borders and political passions and centralized authority, the West had been spared.
Each time he came to Czechoslovakia and particularly after Jan had moved back to Prague, he brought him as many scientific journals as he could manage, as if they were not only the tools of their mutual trade, but talismanic objects which would somehow placate the goddess of fortune. Gradually, too, in the latter part of the eighties, he had been able to put in a word here and there and help to ensure Jan a place at the Institute.
And now that everything had changed and East and West were no longer markers of political difference but had supposedly returned to being points on the compass, he still had the sense of outstanding debts that had to be paid if new evils - of poverty and retribution and ethnic conflict - were to be kept at bay.
The latest and grandest instalment in that debt was in part the reason for this visit.
Stephen lifted his Powerbook onto Jan’s desk, flicked the switch just as the phone began to ring with monotonous insistence. He picked it up.
‘Jan?’ A woman’s voice at the other end queried.
‘No, sorry. He’s not here. May I take a message.’
There was a pause. ‘Is that Stephen Caldwell?’ the voice asked hesitantly in English.
‘Yes.’
‘Stephen. It’s Hanka. Hallo.’
‘Hello. Good to hear you, Hanka. Are you well? And Eva?’
Another pause. ‘Has Jan told you?’
‘Told me what?’
‘No. I see. That we do not live together anymore.’
‘No.’ Stephen put the phone in his other hand. His palm was moist. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said lamely.
‘It is not for you to be sorry. It is for him to be sorry. But that is neither here nor there. Please remind him that he must go to Eva’s school tonight to meet her teachers. At seven o’clock. Good-bye.’
‘Hanka. Wait. I…’
Stephen heard the signal crackling in his ear. Slowly he put the telephone down. He felt… well, he didn’t know exactly how he felt. Distressed, embarrassed, at odds, disappointed, surprised, sad, uncomfortable. He wasn’t good at dealing with emotion. He had heard Hanka’s. And he liked Hanka. Had always liked her. He had always thought she was like Tessa. A Czech version of her perhaps, blonde and cool and self-sufficient. And flirtatious where Tessa was wry. He had always thought Jan would like Tessa too if he met her. Though Stephen hadn’t introduced them on the one occasion when Jan had come to Cambridge some three years back. He didn’t quite know why. It just hadn’t happened.
It had something to do with Sonya, a kind of tact perhaps, which didn’t want to introduce another woman where Jan’s sister, Sonya, should have been. He had felt that, but had preferred not to probe the feeling. He didn’t like to unlock that room in himself. Within it, he was paralysed, useless, a stunted being, barely capable of deep breath.
Yet the door to the room was ajar now and Sonya stood at its threshold, shy, silent, with that beautiful down-turned gaze, which spoke to him more loudly than bold looks and a quantity of words. Just as she had stood at the door of that house in Brno.
Jan’s half-sister, Sonya, whom he had met that evening after the incident at the border crossing. She was a slim waif of a girl, with angel-pale hair and a musing expression as if she were wandering in some airy remote sphere far removed from the overcrowded rooms with their heavy scratched furniture. When she had turned her slow, gentle gaze on Stephen, he had felt like some uniquely precious creature beckoned towards that distant place. He had followed her movements round the house that first night without quite knowing he was mesmerized by them. And by the soft, lilting cadences of her voice.
He had discovered that she was older than he had estimated, older than him in fact and already a practising chemist who worked in a plant where chromite ore was converted into ferrochromium. He had stayed on in Brno for another day. Sonya had an afternoon off and she had offered to show him the sights. She was the only sight he had taken in. Her voice, her long, slender fingers, her musing eyes drew him as surely as a siren-song.
The following morning while he was making his way, already behind schedule, to Prague, it came to him that he was in love. Sonya’s presence trailed him. Her voice with its charming broken English sang in his ears. He postponed his trip to Poland and returned to Brno. But he didn’t know how to speak his emotions. His experience with women was hardly extensive. And they had always been the ones to make the first move. Indeed, the second. Sonya just smiled her sweet, slightly melancholy smile at him and he remained speechless on all the points where it might have counted.
At Christmas, he went back to Brno, determined to make an overture. But Sonya was unwell, had a wracking cough which he could hear at night through the thin partitions of the house. Her mother wouldn’t allow her out into the icy cold of that winter. And under her mother’s watchful gaze, Stephen found himself unable to broach anything intimate. Only on his last night had he managed to see her alone for a moment and ask her whether, if it could be arranged, she might like to visit England.
She had looked at him with a golden expectancy in her features and nodded a breathless, yes. He had kissed her then, first her smooth cheek and then unable to stop himself, her lips. They were warm and dry and fluttered with hesitancy, like the fingers she raised to his neck. He had held her then, felt a fragility he wanted to shield with his life. When he finally released her, her eyes glowed, their melancholy extinguished and he had whispered the words of love he had never before uttered.
Back in England, he had embarked on enquiries. The process was even more complicated than he had presumed and there was no guarantee that the Czech authorities, with their arbitrariness, would sanction a visa. He started to write to Sonya, soaring letters where he began to say some of the things he couldn’t bring himself to utter out loud. He didn’t know whether she received all of them. Her answers were sporadic, friendly, but matter-of-fact and never to the point. When he applied for a new visa to visit Czechoslovakia the following summer, it was refused. He wrote to her to suggest they meet in Budapest.
A few weeks after the visa application, a telephone call from the Foreign Office beckoned him to London to lunch at a Club in Pall Mall. He went with alacrity, seeing a chance here for a plea for Sonya. The man who met him had a pudding of a face beneath wispy blond hair and a thin pin-striped suit which crumpled round his girth in comfortable dishevellment. He poured and downed claret at a startling rate. Yet his watery eyes when they fixed on Stephen had an uncanny shrewdness. And about Stephen’s history, he seemed to be better informed than Stephen himself. He knew the exact trajectory of his parents’ lives as well as the timing of their deaths. He knew about Simone and about Stephen’s trips to the East. He knew about his work. The only thing it seemed he didn’t know were Stephen’s political opinions and since these hardly had much shape, Stephen, his discomfort growing, found himself reduced to rather fewer words than the solemn waiter who brought their steak and kidney pie.
When, towards the end of that lunch, Stephen enunciated the words he had barely dared to utter to himself - that he wanted to marry a Czech woman - the man looked at him oddly and murmured, ‘No, no, dear boy, that wouldn’t do. That would pose problems.’
It was only in the train on the way back to Cambridge, as he ran through the lunchtime conversation in his mind, that Stephen realised he was being recruited by MI 6. He felt at once uneasy and strangely flattered. When a second call came, this time to lunch in a room at King’s College, he made it clear amidst the innuendos that he was not a political animal, that he was primarily interested in his laboratory pursuits.
‘Of course, of course.’ The man had given him a faint smile and settled his tie primly on his ample stomach. ‘But if you hear of anything in that domain, anything that may be useful to us, research into interesting chemicals, you know the kind of thing, you will naturally get in touch with me.’
‘Naturally,’ Stephen had murmured, hoping that the word would magically result in a new visa to Czechoslovakia. He had never found out whether it eventually had. Nor had he ever contacted the man again. When it came to the bottom line, he preferred to be a free agent. He had other priorities.
When he mentioned the incident to Simone, just before heading off to a Budapest where Sonya wouldn’t be, she had smiled her enigmatic smile and told him that now, there was an inevitability to it, he would find himself asked to contribute an article to some Moscow journal. He must be a little wary. This was the way the KGB liked to begin their recruitment.
He had gone on then to tell her about what he hadn’t previously been able to bring himself to report: the misadventure of the tricky border crossing. How that had led him to Jan and then to his sister, Sonya, whom he was in love with, wanted to marry.
Simone had looked at him in troubled astonishment. ‘Sonya Martin, you say?’ She had turned away then, as if she didn’t like to chastise him face to face for the folly of his innocence. ‘But Stephen. This is impossible. It is also dangerous. Not so much for you, but for them. I hope you have covered your tracks.’ He must have looked his stubbornness, so she had thrown up her arms dramatically. ‘It would be far wiser for you to form a partnership closer to home, Stephen. And soon. You should leave Czechoslovakia alone for a while.’
He hadn’t listened. At Easter, he returned to Brno. The buds were just beginning to be visible on the tips of the chestnuts. As they strayed for a week-end walk into what was almost countryside under a sky dotted with a pale fluff of clouds, Sonya had looked so ethereally beautiful that he had poured out his love, his hopes in one great ungainly splutter. She had smiled and curled her hand into his. He had taken it for a yes.
Two days later, when he could tear himself away from her, he had spoken to Jan. It was already late. Jan was on night duty and Stephen had accompanied him on the short trek to the hospital. He had put his arm round Stephen’s shoulder. ‘I would not deny you anything, my friend. You must know that. And I have wanted Sonya to be happy. But it is not so easy.’
He had said nothing more for a block and Stephen had grown nervous with apprehension.
‘You see, Sonya is ill. Very ill. She does not know herself how ill.’ From the tense grip on his shoulder, Stephen had realised how ill. He had stopped in the middle of the pavement as if an abyss had
opened before him. Jan had had to urge him on.
‘In the best of all possible worlds, even in an only slightly better one, I would say to you, Go. Take her to England. Make her happy even for a short time. But we do not live in that world. Already the neighbours have begun to notice your repeated presence here. They are suspicious. And my mother and Hanka, they are worried. Your letters were not such a good idea. If now you marry Sonya, manage to take her away, given that she has the strength and the will for it, it will almost certainly rebound on us. Badly, I fear. Jobs, you know. All that.’ Jan had shrugged his misery.
Stephen had been mute, unable to take in the full weight of what was being said to him. Only in the long hours of that night on the narrow sofa with its prodding springs had he begun to experience the acrid taste of despair.
The next evening Jan had visibly chased everyone from the house so that Stephen and Sonya could be alone. They had sat on that same sofa, stroked each other’s hair, kissed, touched with a longing which held more passion than the room seemed to be able to contain. Only the imminent return of Sonya’s mother had prevented them from stumbling towards the bedroom. Instead they made promises of a sweetness so poignant that Stephen began to feel the world could be changed in their image.
He stayed in Brno until his visa allowed him only a single day for that sanctioned visit to the Academy in Prague. He told Sonya that by summer he would arrange all the necessary papers with which to whisk her away. As he said it, he believed it. And in the intervening months, he moved heaven and earth and Simone to make his fantasy fact. Simone, despite her counsel to the contrary, came through. Perhaps she had determined that things had already gone so far that there was no return. Sonya was granted the ten-day visa which would take her to Paris in August.
The Things We Do For Love Page 14