The Things We Do For Love

by Lisa Appignanesi

  When she woke, Staszek was gazing down at her, the crumpled telegram in his hand. He bent to kiss her, but she turned her face away.

  ‘You must go to him,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t wait to be rid of me.’ She hissed at him and he gripped her hand, too hard, so that she had to struggle from his grasp.

  His look had grown cold then. ‘I love you, Simone. But love is not the most important thing in the world. Understand that. Please try to understand that.’

  Something in her recoiled, but she had purchased a ticket for the following day so she could see him once more that evening. He had come home, looking pale and harassed and she had found herself saying, ‘Come with me Staszek, please. Paris will be good, for both of us.’ She had begged, a tone she didn’t know she possessed taking her over. Coming with her, it had seemed clear to her, would constitute a choice: her over Karolina.

  The tormented look on his face had turned to anger. He had treated her like a spoiled child of limited intelligence. ‘You refuse to understand. There’s too much pressure at the moment. The Party couldn’t allow it.’

  ‘But you’ll come. Soon.’ She had held out a dying hope.

  He had shrugged.

  She couldn’t bring herself to share his bed that night. The tangled unspoken emotions lay between them like barbed wire tearing the skin at every move. In the morning he had driven her to the station. He had waved at her for a long time, a dark receding figure whose very smallness frightened her. She had sat there, worrying over her father. Brooding over her relations with Staszek. Trying not to think of that woman with him. And then thinking that all along she had shadowed their lives. Karolina had been there before the war, perhaps already more than a comrade. Karolina had been there ever since Simone’s return to the city, a lover with arms as long as those of the Party which embraced him.

  As the train wheezed and chugged its way towards France, Karolina’s proportions grew as vast as the distance which separated her from Staszek, blended in her mind with the Party which had stolen Staszek from her, became its flesh and blood embodiment - a mistress with a thousand eyes and tentacles, who demanded a loyalty beyond all others.

  Yet Karolina was also simply another woman. And Staszek a betrayer who had made his choice.

  The snow was falling more thickly now, dense white flakes whirling before her eyes, shrouding her vision. In the graveyard behind the church, the stones wore mantles of filigree, like old women stooped in prayer. Oblivious to the cold, Simone stared down the escarpment. The swathe of the river lay beneath her, that point where the Vltava and the Labe flowed into one.

  It was somewhere near here that Staszek’s body had been spotted, its dead bloated weight carried by the current from Prague, where he had plunged into the swift-moving waters. But that was later.

  First, some three months after she had returned to her father in Paris, there had been that call summoning her to the Czech Embassy. Michel had come with her. Her father had already introduced her to Michel then, his younger colleague and friend from the Quai d’Orsay. Michel had watched her as she scanned the pages of the documents which the taciturn embassy official placed in front of her, his stubby fingers indicating the place where she had to sign. Divorce proceedings. She had signed the papers in an angry black scrawl like a silent howl. Whatever hopes she may have held out for Staszek, it was now patently clear that that foul woman had totally won him over. He had not even bothered to give Simone advance warning. There had been no personal note.

  Later, she realised that even if he had written, there was little likelihood of a letter making its way to her. The purges had begun, effectively sealing the country off from the West. It was from a former superior in the French Embassy in Prague that she heard the news both of Staszek’s re-marriage and subsequently his arrest.

  They had met at the Café Voltaire and she had smoked furiously during the meeting, despite the fact that she suspected she was pregnant with Michel’s and her first child. Monsieur Duval had spoken to her in a flat voice.

  ‘As you know, the Party has been engaged in a major job of internal cleansing. It keeps the mind off the failures of the economy. All members are potentially at risk of being purged, but particularly those who’ve had any links with the West, who spent the war years here, or who show signs of Bourgeois deviation - code word for intellectuals. And Jews, of course, who combine all of those.’

  ‘And Staszek?’ Simone was trembling.

  ‘He’s in jail, which means he’s probably been accused of sabotage, betraying the Party, perhaps spying, taking bribes. It doesn’t matter. It’s all a pack of lies, trumped up, a way of scaring people so they toe the line. Though some of the accused seem to believe it, the sincere ones. They really believe that if the Party accuses them, they may have done something wrong, something outside their knowledge. Or even if they know they’re innocent, they feel their accusation must, in some inexplicable way, be in the best interests of the nation. It’s a strange form of self-immolation, a loyalty beyond reason.’

  ‘Yes.’ Simone recognized the portrait. ‘Can we do anything?

  ‘Not very much at the moment. We’re powerless. We have no right to interfere in the internal workings of their country. All we can hope is that the thing will burn itself out soon. And there are so many arrests that it will have to.’ He had tried a smile. ‘The joke is making the rounds that on Thursdays and Fridays after the Central Committee has met, it’s best to go to the movies so that you’re not home to hear the knock on the door.’

  Despite repeated attempts to get news, she didn’t hear any more of Staszek until after Rudolf Slansky, the Secretary General of the Party, had been arrested at the end of 1951. Then a letter delivered by special courier reached her in the house where she now lived with Michel. The envelope contained a note from Monsieur Duval saying the enclosed letter had been delivered by hand to the Embassy addressed to her.

  Her fingers had shaken so violently that it had taken her three readings to make sense of the letter.

  My dearest Simone,

  I want you to know that I have thought of you often over these last years. I also want you to know that it has taken me a very long time, but I have at last realised that you were right. Always right. In prison it was the playing and replaying in my mind of every note of the Spring Sonata which saved me from madness and the confessing of lies I had all but begun to believe were truths. A sharp is not a flat and to put F where E should be destroys a sequence. The little things count. They become big things.

  Do you remember, that turn of the hill on the Heath, that little grassy hump where we used to sit and hold hands? I thought of that far more often over those months than of the opening lines of the Manifesto. So you were right. My darling.

  I used to laugh at you for liking the stories of our Prague Golem. And now I feel as if I have helped to create one and he has turned his envious vengeance on all of us. He wears no cabbalist’s gown, but the plain suit of the Party.

  I do not know why and how everything I have believed in has gone so badly awry. I cannot bring myself to think that everything we hoped for was utterly bad. But at the moment I feel I have been an accomplice in a terrible crime and there is only one way for me to stop being that accomplice. I am also afraid that if they take me in again, I will break and sign the inquisitor’s piece of paper and you will think that not even at the last did I know the difference between truth and lies.

  As for my relations with Karolina, whose name I know you don’t want to hear, I can only say that I was wrong. At the last, it was a brief coming together in the vertigo of false hopes and blind lies and not a little arm-twisting.

  Forgive me. I wish I had more to leave you than my love.

  Staszek

  She had wept, hot burning tears. Through them, Staszek’s words had etched themselves into her mind, letter by letter.

  Some lines of Karl Marx’s that Staszek had been in the habit of quoting, came to her then. ‘Men make their own his
tory, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under ones directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’

  But perhaps she had thought of that later, after she had already learned of Staszek’s death, and rage whipped through her, a hot and terrible desire for revenge propelled by memory and nightmare.

  Simone stopped by a lone grave at some distance from the main cemetery. She leaned her hand against it. Her gloved fingers left an imprint in the snow, like the brush of a bird’s wing. With tears pricking at her eyes, she found a stick and prodded at the frozen earth until she had excavated a tiny crevice. From her bag she took a plain gold wedding band and placed it in the gap. She covered it as best she could.

  When the cold had so stiffened her old limbs that she could barely put one foot in front of another, she forced herself into movement.

  It was too bad she hadn’t known about the child.

  -12-

  _____________

  Ted Knight picked the fax out of the newly installed machine, looked at the brief lines of type from his LA office and felt all his well-tuned muscles tense.

  ‘The lowdown you asked for on Tessa Hughes: most interesting thing is that she’s Stephen Caldwell’s wife…’

  He didn’t bother with the rest. Without putting on his jacket, he strode from the room and jabbed at the elevator button. Too slow. With a glare of impatience, he made for the stairs, took them two at a time for the length of three floors.

  What the woman was playing at, he didn’t know. But he didn’t like those kinds of games. Didn’t like them one little bit.

  Room 832. That’s what the note had said. He knocked loudly and without waiting, tried the knob. Locked. He knocked again. In the old days he would have bashed the thin strip of ply in. No problem.

  Maybe she was in the bathroom. She. Tessa Hughes. Stephen Caldwell’s wife. Unbelievable! He thumped at the door again. She shouldn’t have kept that from him. There had been plenty of opportunity to tell him.

  Still no answer. He glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty. She was playing the early bird today. If she was out, she was up to something, that was for sure. That proper little note, left for him last night when he had got back from the reception. ‘Exhausting day. I need some sleep, some time on my own. Got myself a room. 832. See you tomorrow.’

  Maybe Jan Martin had mentioned Caldwell and she had taken fright. Didn’t want her husband bumping into her. In flagrante delicto. Or was there more to it than that? Women. They were always his weakness. He should have checked her out sooner. But she had seemed so clean. So innocent.

  Ted Knight vented his anger on the door.

  A face peered out from the neighbouring room. He gave the woman a smile of stunning artifice. She smiled back and with a murmured ‘Good Morning,’ he retraced his steps.

  In his room, he stared again at the fax. It complicated things unnecessarily. He would have to punish her for that.

  Tessa stood in the shower and pretended to be oblivious to the muted sounds at her door. She wasn’t in the mood for Ted. All she wanted was for that jet stream of water to wash away the image of that baby she had abandoned to the arms of the police. But it wouldn’t. The imprint of that small head nestling against her survived the soap, the towel’s rubbing, just as it had a night of tossing and turning.

  She caught her reflection in the sharp-eyed hotel mirror. Despite the traces of age, the slight sag of bottom, it wasn’t a bad body. But it was a maidenly body. The breasts were trim, the nipples small, the aureoles neat. There were no smudges or spreads or stretch marks on bosom or belly. Her sister had pointed that out to her one day when they had been swimming together. They had stood in the changing room in front of the mirror and Pen had groaned, ‘It’s just not fair. Look at the two of us. You, slender and virginal. And me, the survivor of some volcanic cataclysm.’

  Tessa hadn’t said anything except a murmured ‘Don’t be silly,’ since there was no contradicting Pen when she decided to engage on a gargantuan orgy of self-hatred which took in the curl of her hair and ended with the callouses on her feet. After which, she would pick up the children and cuddle them and laugh and get on with daily life.

  And leave Tessa feeling insubstantial.

  Why? Tessa asked herself yet again as she flopped onto the hotel bed. It was not as if she believed women’s destiny lay in having children. Could it really be simply the ticking away of the biological clock, the whiff of middle-age and mortality which made her so adamant? An animal need, a genetically encoded need to reproduce herself? She didn’t like that. Didn’t like the sense of being reduced to a few simple formulae which determined everything from the start.

  Tessa gripped the pillow and felt the little girl nestling against her, clinging, round dark eyes staring into hers. A void opened inside her, deep, crisscrossed with pain, as dark as that gaze. The child had needed her and she had betrayed that need.

  And perhaps that was it. She wanted a child because she needed that need. The need grounded her, gave her substance. She had never really been needed. Stephen didn’t need her. That was patently obvious. Nor had lovers before, whatever the nature of their attachment. And work - well, at work one was always replaceable.

  At home, she had been the middle daughter, the negligible filling between a strong-minded elder sister, apple of her father’s eye, and a baby brother, doted on by his mum. And by Tessa. She suddenly remembered that. She had lugged Robbie about, a squirming weight, too big really for her five-year-old limbs, and her father had laughingly urged her on while her mother chastised her. And then, no sooner was Robbie deposited, than everyone promptly forgot about her.

  She didn’t mind really. She had plenty to get on with. Games, homework, friends and later, books. She wasn’t unhappy. But she felt somehow insubstantial, a bit of flotsam floating on the surface of life.

  Babies stopped one from floating. She had felt that. Felt it intensely yesterday. Their need gave one ballast. They were an anchor which prevented a drunken careering. Off and over the edge.

  With sudden decision, Tessa pulled on clothes, applied a modicum of make-up for Parisian reassurance and made her way down to the lobby. As the lift doors slid open, she held her breath and glanced round swiftly. No sign of Ted. That was a good beginning. She hastened towards the front desk, put her question and, after a moment, was handed a printed list by the assistant, together with a small map on which he painstakingly marked x’s.

  Outside, the cold was bitter. A dingy grey sky clothed castle and spires in gloom. Exhaust billowed from cars, furled and hung in the icy air. People hurried, their collars turned up against the wind, their faces obscured beneath hats and muffled scarfs.

  Tessa turned her back to the river and followed the map through twisting, cobbled streets. The first agency turned her away with a promise that they could accommodate her in one or two day’s time. The second suggested she return after lunch. She considered making an appointment, then tested her own disquiet and hurried on.

  She was in a street so narrow that the tall thin houses seemed to bend and meet above her head. The few shopwindows were murky with age, their only goods a smattering of frayed posters. She fixed her gaze on these. Amongst them, as she turned the corner, she noticed a sign in several languages announcing personal guided tours. She glanced down at her list, then impatient with it, pushed open a door whose fresh blue paint put its neighbours’ grime to shame. It was a door which invited confidence, though the loud bell which clattered above her as she pushed it open made her jump.

  The tiny office was empty but for a large star of David on the wall, a clock, and a computer, brazenly new, on the desk. Tessa cleared her throat, had not quite finished doing so when a young woman appeared from behind a rustle of beaded curtain. She was younger than Tessa, thirty perhaps. A curtain of straight blonde hair opened on a fresh scrubbed face whic
h was all cheekbones and wide eyes. She was wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt in bright checks and she stuck out her hand at Tessa in brusque mannish fashion.

  ‘Gut morgen. Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’ Tessa ventured back.

  She grinned. ‘English. Good. How can I help you?

  Tessa grinned back. Her accent was broad Brooklyn but the gestures seemed to have come from a Western.

  ‘I’m looking for a guide. For today. Straightaway if possible.’

  ‘That’s a bit hard. I’m all alone in the office. You could join one of the other parties, if you like that. They’re only two in each.’ She glanced at the large classroom clock. ‘Probably in the old synagogue by now. I take you over. Okay?’

  ‘No. You don’t understand. I’d like a guide for myself. And I don’t want to go to the synagogue. I want to go to a police station.’

  The woman placed a hand on her hip and rolled comic eyes at her. ‘So what are you doing in a Jewish tour agency? We specialise in the Josefov. Jewish Prague. You think that constitutes a special relationship with the police?’

  ‘No, no.’ Tessa flushed. ‘I… You see what I really want is an interpreter. Yesterday…’ Tessa found herself recounting her story in tense detail to that engaging presence.

  Eyes of chocolate brown glimmered. A dimple came and went in a downy cheek. ‘Boy. You sure know how to see Prague. A baby, eh? And some gypsy. Now I understand. They sent you here because we Jews know all about stealing babies.’

  Tessa was about to react when she saw the glint of irony in the woman’s face. She found herself giggling, despite the tears that a moment ago had threatened to form. ‘Yes, that must be it.’

  ‘But listen. I’m expensive. Really expensive. Cause I’m an expert in all this.’ She waved her hand effusively in the direction of the window. ‘Twenty dollars an hour, I charge. That’s ten dollars for the guiding and ten dollars for the Ph.D. in theology, which you don’t need. So maybe you should go to another agency. I’ve got some addresses.’