by Sue Gee
She picked up her jacket and bag.
They followed in her wake.
The Café Slavia was a dream, an art nouveau coffee house not far from the river, opposite the National Theatre, all cream and chocolate and brass interior, with opaque glass lamps on curving stems, a grand piano, round tables, ladies in hats. Havel used to come here, Karel told them: it had long been a writers’haunt, a place for talking, smoking, exchanging ideas. He did not seem to be here today. Hannah arrived – looking, in a skirt and blouse, as if she had made an effort but still felt out of place. Gaby, accompanying her, wore a dress.
‘I wish you had told us,’ said Harriet, as they all sat down.
Karel shrugged. ‘I did not know. This is Danielle’s idea.’
Danielle laughed. It had been a spur of the moment thought, when she had heard they were coming. She passed the menu. So. What would they have?
They had chicken in paprika sauce, a cucumber salad, fruit compote. They had coffee in tiny black and gold cups and Danielle paid the bill. And then she led them all outside again.
Karel had to return to the office for a meeting.
‘My apologies. I shall see you soon.’
They spent an hour or longer with Danielle, in a street behind the waterfront, looking at the restoration work being done on a fine baroque building. Plastic sheeting shrouded the upper floors, a skip stood on the pavement, there was dust everywhere. Danielle talked and talked. Her clients, a new property company, were running out of money; she was advising them about a loan, but suggesting that perhaps they might consider turning the ground floor into a restaurant. This was the kind of thing Karel had mentioned as helping to destroy a local community. Harriet, carefully, mentioned this, and rather wished she hadn’t. Danielle produced papers from her briefcase; she quoted statistics detailing growth in the economy, the healthy effect of foreign tourism on restaurants of just such character. They followed her from room to empty room, smelling new plaster, picturing it all. Marsha and Gaby picked up workmen’s tools and put them down again.
‘You will get filthy,’ said Danielle.
And then, at last, the tour stopped, they were out in the street again, saying goodbye. Hannah and Gaby were accompanying Danielle back to the office, where they would wait for her to finish work. This evening, she was taking Gaby home to her own apartment, on the other side of Nove Mesto. Harriet and Marsha must come and see her there one evening, before their return to London: that would be a pleasure.
Perhaps, Hannah suggested, Marsha could come and see Gaby tomorrow? Harriet could have a little time to herself, if she wished.
They shook hands, they thanked Danielle; she gave them, both, the lightest kiss on each cheek. And then she was gone, turning the corner, down towards Charles Square, and Harriet and Marsha drew breath, and made for the river again, where they found a wooden bench and sat looking out at the water in an exhausted silence.
Harriet, in the pension bathroom, washing away the heat and fatigue of the afternoon in cloudy tap water, heard the low, single, continental note of the telephone sound through the house. She dried her hands and came out, wondering. Pani Maria was calling her, from the foot of the stairs. An English gentleman, in a phone box.
Harriet came down slowly to the dark little hall overlooking the courtyard. Outside, it was still very hot, though the sun was sinking. A few dry leaves fell from the tree, on to the cracked flagstones.
‘Hello?’
‘Harriet.’
‘Christopher.’ Her stomach turned over. ‘How nice to hear you.’
‘And you.’ He went straight to the point. ‘You said you had news of Susanna.’
‘Yes.’ She drew a breath, leaning against the wall by the telephone table, seeing herself, very pale, in the mildewed mirror above. Pani Maria, in slippers, had gone out into the courtyard, she was sweeping the ground, as she did every evening, brushing up the day’s accumulation of city dust, bread dropped from the table, fallen leaves.
She said: ‘It’s not very good –’ and told him, listening to the steady sweep sweep of the long rush broom, over and over the flags.
She found she was shaking again.
‘Christopher?’
‘Yes. Jesus.’ He had gone white, she could feel it.
‘I want to see you.’
‘Yes.’ He was thinking. ‘Tomorrow?’ A pause. ‘I’ll meet you in the saddest place in Prague.’
‘I know where that is,’ she said, thinking of Kafka, of dandelions in uncut grass, clouds passing over the empty plots of land, but she didn’t know.
Dark elder grew within the perimeter walls; birches and lime trees shaded raised, uneven ground, bare earth. In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, the gravestones stood so close together that in many places it was difficult to walk between them: they leaned against one another at angles, broken and grey, crammed into the ground. Lichen covered the worn reliefs of hands giving benediction, of jugs anointing; it crept into the crevices of Hebrew lettering; dates, verses, names of the dead.
Beyond the walls, the sound of traffic on the northern, art nouveau boulevard of Parizska was a distant hum. It was mid-afternoon. Harriet, who had left Marsha with Gaby and Hannah, walked in the heat past leafy Jan Palach Square, and along to the crossroads of Listo Padu and Brehova. She came to the cemetery entrance – a synagogue on one side, the Memorial Hall on the other – and went through.
Christopher was waiting beneath the trees, amidst the gravestones.
He was wearing his creased linen jacket, his hands in the pockets. He looked as he had looked the last time she saw him, in the hall of the Hotel Scheiber: heavy and tired and ill at ease, his face puffy, though the bruise had faded, had almost gone.
‘Hello.’ He came towards her, unsmiling; he did not give her a kiss in greeting.
‘Hello.’ Harriet looked up at him, nervous and uncertain.
‘Where’s your daughter?’
‘With friends. Down in Žižkov.’ She looked away.
‘Well –’ he said abruptly, and turned, moving towards a narrow path.
Here we are again –
She did not say it. She moved alongside him; they walked where they could, amidst the stones. For over three hundred years, since the fifteenth century, this cramped plot had been the only burial ground for the Jews of Prague. As they died within the overcrowded ghetto, where four or five families shared a house, they were brought here, the earth reopened, another coffin dropped down on to those below. The ground was raised, as more bodies came; some of the stones, shifting, now marked the graves of the wrong family. The bodies lay eight, ten, twelve deep; Harriet and Christopher, two of the afternoon’s visitors, were walking amongst ten or twelve thousand stones, above a hundred thousand bodies. In death, as in life, the Jews were crammed together.
In 1781, when the Emperor Josef granted an Edict of Toleration, the gates came off the walled ghetto. The district was given his name – Josefov – and a community was effectively destroyed: no separate schools, no Hebrew or Yiddish. Six years later the cemetery was closed: from that time, burials were in the New Jewish Cemetery which Harriet had visited.
In the war, yellow stars replaced medieval yellow cloaks. Then came the Holocaust, and the burial plots lay empty. And now, the cemetery where Harriet and Christopher were walking in a difficult silence was almost all that remained of the old Jewish Quarter. In a sweep-clean, expansionist mood at the end of the nineteenth century, when Prague had looked to Paris for an elegant, bourgeois city on which to model itself, every tenement, every little shop had been razed to the ground. Now there were only synagogues, a town hall, a museum; this densely populated graveyard, evoking the vanished lives of centuries.
And what of Susanna’s life, which she had so nearly ended? What of Christopher, walking beside Harriet in silence, his hands in his pockets, looking straight ahead?
‘Not the best circumstances in which to meet,’ he said at last.
‘No. I’m sorry.’
> ‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. For Susanna, about Susanna – I’ve been thinking of her so much since we arrived. When I spoke to Hugh it was – I don’t know – almost like a confirmation. I could feel something building up in me – it’s hard to explain.’
Footsteps were passing the perimeter walls; the afternoon heat was intense. Birds rustled the leaves in the branches above them.
She said: ‘I visited Kafka’s grave,’ and she told him – or tried to tell him – of her feelings then: unease, desolation, her sense of Susanna’s broken spirit.
She said, with great hesitation, ‘And I thought of you, too. In that way, in that context …’
He did not answer. They walked on, coming back to the entrance, continuing. Harriet was looking at the ground, at the caked earth, dappled with shade.
He said: ‘We should be here in winter. Let me show you something I find unbearably sad, and poetic.’
She lifted her head: he was indicating a gravestone with something resting on its worn flat rim: a pebble, and beneath it a piece of paper.
‘What’s that?’ She moved towards it.
‘A wish. A message. From someone to someone else, from lovers, from descendants to the Lord Jehovah – who knows? They leave them here all the time.’ He crossed to the pebble, and lifted it; he unfolded the paper. They looked at a few Hebrew words, a signature. ‘Sometimes they’re in Hebrew, but mostly in Czech. And visitors leave them. Like prayers in churches, you know?’
‘Yes.’
He refolded the paper. ‘Keep looking, there’ll be more.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘No doubt they’re collected. Mostly they’re blown away by the wind. Then more come. People have been leaving them here for centuries. Tradition dates it back to the Exodus – nothing but stones to mark desert graves. There.’ He replaced the pebble; she noticed, again, the tremor in his hands. ‘A little piece of history for you.’
‘Thank you.’
They walked on. He said: ‘For all I know, they could be shopping lists. But I don’t think they are. And I do find the idea moving – all that hope, all that longing, left for the wind to blow across a graveyard.’
She could not speak. This was the man she had once dismissed? This was the loud, intrusive guest?
At length she said, again with infinite caution, ‘Susanna left a message, too. I do not begin to understand it –’
‘No.’ He felt in his pocket, then lit a cigarette, dropping the lighter back. ‘I’m sorry, I suppose I shouldn’t.’
‘Everyone smokes in Prague.’
‘But not here.’ He inhaled deeply.
She said, remembering the starry sky above Malá Strana, leaning out of the window, the night of the telephone call, ‘Since Berlin – since what has happened – sometimes I’ve wondered if you’re the person Susanna needs, in spite of everything – you’re the one who understands her, and can help her –’
‘On the contrary.’ He drew in smoke again, almost violently; he let it out again in a great stream. ‘I am the last person to help Susanna.’
‘Because –’
‘Because I can’t even help myself. Because I ruin every bloody thing I touch, that’s why.’
‘Christopher –’
‘What?’ He was smoking, pacing, looking at the ground. ‘Here we are again,’ he said bitterly. ‘Because somebody tried to kill herself.’
‘Not just because –’
‘Isn’t it? Listen.’ He threw the cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his foot, kicked over a covering of earth. ‘Listen. I want to talk to you. I wanted to see you, I’ve seen you. I’m going to talk, if you will be kind enough to listen, and then we shall say goodbye.’
She said bleakly: ‘Go on.’
He said: ‘I’m divorced. You’re divorced. The whole fucking world is divorced, these days.’
Karel, also. She thought of the box on the chest of drawers, the two rings, side by side.
‘And your parents?’
‘My parents are happy,’ she said. ‘They have a good marriage, I think.’
‘How reassuring. Perhaps that explains your fundamental good sense. My parents hated each other. They split up when I was four, then they tried again, then it didn’t work. I was sent off to boarding school, out of the way of the rows. That’s where I met your nice brother.’
‘Yes.’
Pritchard was a bit of a bully in those days – we kept an eye on him –
Did he ever do anything to harm you?
No, never, he just had a reputation –
‘Most of the rest of my life I’ve told you about – an edited version, anyway. In Berlin. But that’s where it all began, I think. I was abandoned. Bring on the violins. It almost killed me.’
There were others in the cemetery: middle-aged women were talking quietly, a man in a skull-cap was leading a child, pointing things out on the gravestones. Christopher walked away from them all; Harriet followed.
He said: ‘I did various unpleasant things to people at school. That’s not so uncommon. Bullying in distant places, coming home in the holidays to listen to your parents tear each other apart. All term I wanted to go home, all holidays I wanted to go back to school. Jesus. You can’t talk about yourself to your teachers, you can’t talk to your parents – it all gets sat on, and buried. That’s how I understand Susanna – not her particular brand of self-hatred, it’s true, but the fact of its existence, the feelings that go with it. That doesn’t mean I can help her. We almost destroyed each other, I told you.’
He lit another cigarette; disapproving glances came across the cemetery.
‘They’re right, they’re right, everyone’s right except me.’
‘Christopher – I care so much for you …’
It was true, it was true.
He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t, Harriet, not if you got to know me.’
That’s what Susanna had said, weeping in the little garden behind the Grand Place, rubbing her foot in the gravel, over and over, a bear in a cage –
‘Christopher, please –’
‘What? Too much self-pity? It’s true – you wouldn’t like me. I thought in Berlin – when we were talking – I thought perhaps – It’s hopeless. I’m eaten away. All the feelings you sit on come out in the end: all that fucking misery has to get out somehow. With me it was risks, and dangerous money. I fell foul, I told you, I’m still paying for it, literally. I do things you wouldn’t believe –’
‘That’s enough,’ said Harriet, her hands to her face. ‘Stop. Please. I don’t want to hear any more.’
He stopped, dead in his tracks. ‘You see? What did I tell you?’
‘No, no, I mean just for now – it’s too much, after hearing about Susanna, I’m too upset – perhaps all this touches a chord in myself, I don’t know. But for now – I think you should stop. I think we should go somewhere else, and sit quietly, and try to be calm –’
He walked towards the wall, he leaned against it, smoking. He ground the cigarette underfoot.
‘A desecration.’
‘It is, rather.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve alarmed you, I’ve upset you, I shouldn’t have come to meet you.’
‘It was I who asked to meet you.’
‘Yes, so it was. But even so –’ He rubbed at his cheek. ‘You’re right: that’s enough, now.’ He looked at her, full in the face, as she stood before him. ‘How is your reunion? How is your friend?’
She looked back at him. She swallowed. ‘He’s terribly nice.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘But –’
‘But nothing.’ He held out his hand; she took it. They went on standing there, just a foot or two apart, holding hands, looking in each other’s eyes, exploring each other’s faces. Around them were the sounds of departing footsteps, and birds, and distant traffic. Then he drew her to him, and turned her round, and held her against his chest, his arms round her, his chin res
ting on her head.
They stood for a while without speaking, quiet and close.
‘There’s another message,’ he said at last.
‘Where?’
‘Just there, to your right, see?’
She looked. It was there: a torn scrap of paper, a smooth white stone.
‘Where do they come from, all these stones and pebbles?’
‘I don’t know. People bring them, I suppose. Perhaps I should have brought one. Perhaps I should leave you a message. Yes? What do you think?’ He buried his face in her hair, she leaned back, brushing her face against his.
‘What would it say? Your message.’
He was silent. ‘Who knows? Dear Harriet, I have fallen in love with you, but I wouldn’t make you happy. Something like that. Bring on the violins.’
She turned in his arms, her mouth met his. There came oblivion, the taste of cigarettes.
‘Christopher –’
Across the cemetery, somebody coughed. They drew apart.
‘A desecration.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on.’ He took her hand; they walked in the deepest silence back towards the gate. Harriet looked down at the caked earth. The first dry leaves of late summer, or early autumn, were falling, now and then, to the ground, brushing the stones. She was trembling.
She said, as they came to the gate, not looking at him, speaking unsteadily, ‘I don’t want to say goodbye.’
‘I thought I should be saying that to you,’ he said slowly.
‘But –’
‘But I wouldn’t make you happy. I know it. I know myself. I’m very sorry.’
They were standing outside on the street again. Passers-by came and went.
Harriet looked at Christopher, heavy and tall and sombre. She thought: I want to lie naked before this man in a shuttered room, and have him stand naked before me –
She closed her eyes.
‘Goodbye.’ He kissed her hair: the gentlest, most tender touch. And then he walked away from her.
So. This was love. So complex, so full of pain.
Harriet stood at the entrance: a synagogue on one side, a Memorial Hall on the other. She thought: I must distract myself. I am not used to feelings like this. I don’t know what to do when I feel like this.