by Joseph Kanon
She grinned. “You think she’s with the DEA?”
“It’s not funny. Christ. You brought it? Over the border?”
She nodded, a little surprised at his anger. “Tampax. They never look. Never. It’s okay.” She swung around on the bed, dropping her leg so that she faced him in the low-cut nightgown, her skin white. He looked at her, an involuntary glance, then moved over to the ashtray.
“It’s not okay,” he said, putting out the joint. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to get rid of it, that’s why. When were you planning to dump it? Just before we hit the iron curtain?”
“Iron curtain,” she said. “It’s just a border.”
“I don’t believe this,” he said, his voice rising. “If you want to spend some time in a Communist jail, save it for your next trip. Did you ever think what might happen if you got caught? To both of us?”
“All right, stop yelling at me.” She went over to the cosmetic bag, took out a tampon, and tossed it on the bed. “There.”
“Is that all of it?”
“Would you like to search me?” she said, spreading her arms.
“Christ, that’s all we need, to get nailed for drugs. Then what?”
She walked over to the bedtable and lit a cigarette, annoyed now. “I don’t know. You’ve got connections. Maybe your father would get us off.”
“That’s not funny.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. What do you want? I thought it wouldn’t matter. It’s not legal in the States either, you know.”
“We’re not in the States. We’re in fucking Austria, with Lisa Koch downstairs and a trip to Husak’s workers’ paradise just down the road. They put people in jail for reading Playboy, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, they don’t.”
“You know what I mean. You want to test them? ”Welcome to Czechoslovakia — you’re busted.“ Christ, Molly, what were you thinking?”
“All right. You made your point. Go flush it down the toilet.” She walked over to the open window. “Boy Scout.”
As she stood by the window, he could see the length of her, the filmy material of her nightgown outlining the lean body, and he bounced between being aroused and irritated, his senses made alert by contradiction, as if the air around him were scratchy. It always seemed to work this way with her, feeling taunted and protective at the same time, then becoming impatient with himself for being distracted. He saw, looking at her, that it wasn’t going to go away, the static, and that most of it was coming from somewhere outside them, the larger interference of the trip and what he would find. Meanwhile, they rubbed against each other, not sure why they were nervous in the first place.
“Sorry,” he said, quietly now. “I just don’t want anything to go wrong.”
He picked up the tampon and walked toward the door.
“Nick?” She came over to him, a peace gesture, and held out her palm. “I’ll do it. What if Frau Berenblum’s out there?” She smiled. “How would you explain this?”
He handed it to her. “I was looking at the map before. If we backtrack to Freistadt, we can head straight up to Dolni Dvoriste tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” she said quickly. “You can’t.”
“Why not?” he said, puzzled at her reaction.
“We’re supposed to be in Vienna. I thought we had to keep to a schedule. You know. Anyway, don’t we have reservations?”
“We’ll cancel. Change of plan.” He turned away from her. “I want to get this over with. We can see Vienna later.”
“But-” She paused. “Are you angry? About the dope? Is that what it is?”
He shook his head. “Forget it. I just want to get there, Molly. Don’t you? What’s so important about Vienna?”
She looked down, at a loss. “Nothing, I guess. It was the plan, that’s all. A little more time.”
“We can be in Prague tomorrow. We’re so close. A drive away. I used to think it was impossible-to go there-and it’s just a drive away.”
“Only from this direction,” she said.
They had their last salad in Freistadt and drove to the border through gently sloping, wooded country, still and empty during the long rural lunch time. He had expected the road to the border to be grim, but the land was placid and rich, neat farms and stretches of old forest promising mushrooms. Then the road curved and the woods fell away and they were looking across a long cleared tract to the checkpoint. Beyond it another empty stretch rose uphill to the Czech crossing. In these open fields it would be impossible to hide.
Without thinking, Nick slowed down, already intimidated. He looked at the guardhouse, the tall watchtower, fences of barbed wire, all the props. But real to them. If you ran out across the field, you would be shot. The Austrian farms ran right up to the border like some jaunty declaration of freedom, but on the Czech side the land was empty. Just the fence. There would be searchlights at night. The guards, playing by the rules, wouldn’t hesitate for a minute. So you kept away, behind the other side of the forest. Maybe nobody ever came this close, to see the elaborate watchtower. If you don’t see the bars, you can pretend you’re not in a cage.
The Austrian border police were bored and perfunctory, stamping their passports and waving them through. Nick wondered how useful they’d be to any escapees. He put the car in gear and moved slowly up the broad hill, aware that they had now left Austria and whatever protection it offered. It was crazy-he had not expected to be frightened, but the years of pictures and warnings flooded through him. They had crossed, just a plain field, into enemy territory.
The Czech guard waved them over to the side of the road. A machine gun hung from his shoulder.
“ Dobre odpoledne,” he said, which Nick understood as good afternoon, and then a line of incomprehensible Czech. When they didn’t respond, he pointed the gun toward the guardhouse.
“He wants us to go in,” Molly said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s like this. Relax.”
She got out of the car, smiling, but the guard ignored her, looking at the back of the car, peeking in through the window.
Inside they managed the essentials with Molly’s smattering of German, but the uniformed officials seemed to be moving underwater, drugged by their heavy lunch. Finally they were led into a plain room-nothing but Husak on the wall-that reminded Nick of interrogation rooms in movies. But there were no questions, just nods and papers being taken to another room, visas being examined, then passed on to someone else, even the offer of tea from the gas ring in the corner. Then they were left alone.
Nick stared out the window at the two guards going over the car. They had placed their guns on the ground and seemed to be examining everything, one of them lying underneath, the other bent over to catch what seemed to be a running commentary. Earlier they had asked for the keys, and now they opened doors and explored the trunk. Inexplicably, they didn’t touch the suitcases, just poked their heads in for a look, then continued to walk around the car. For a second Nick thought they might actually kick the tires, like customers in a showroom.
“There’s something wrong. I can feel it,” Nick said, jittery.
“Maybe,” Molly said. “I don’t know. I flew in before. It’s different at the airport.”
One of the officials came in, handed them their passports, and spoke to Molly in rapid German. Nick watched the exchange, a verbal badminton, waiting to be told.
“It’s the currency form,” Molly said, her voice amused. “It says we changed sterling, but we’ve got American passports, so it’s a confusion.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants you to change money again. Got any dollars? Amazing what a dollar buys here. I hope his wife comes in for a piece.”
“But-”
“Do it, would be my advice.”
Nick shrugged and pulled out a traveler’s check. “This any good?”
“As gold.”
The exchange, with its forms, took a little longer. They were allowed to wait outside now, and Nick stood by the car, looking up at the watchtower and the soldier staring down at him, gun ready. How could his father want to live here? Russia would be even worse. In the patchy sunshine, Nick began to sweat. The barbed wire was higher than he’d expected-you’d have to cut it to get through. He took a cigarette pack from his pocket.
“American?” a guard said, walking up to him. For a wild moment Nick thought it might be contraband, but the guard’s eyes were friendly and Nick realized he was just trying to cadge one. When he offered the pack, the guard smiled and took two.
“Dekuji vam.”
“ Prosim,” Nick replied, trying it.
They stood side by side, smoking, staring down the road to Austria. Nick wondered if guards ever made a run for it. But they seemed sleepy and content, as if the guns and fences were invisible parts of the landscape, like power lines.
Nick felt the guard straighten before he saw the smudge in the distance. It grew into a bus, and the guard alerted the soldier in the watchtower, shouting up in Czech. The soldier answered, then another came out of the guardhouse. Something was going on. The guard next to Nick noisily drew in the last of the American smoke, stubbed it out with his boot, and stood straighter. The second guard joined him, and Nick had the feeling that the others inside were watching too.
The bus drew up at the Austrian crossing and pulled to the side of the road. The Czech guards were talking back and forth. People began filing out of the bus, and even at this distance Nick could see the tennis shoes and bright colors that meant a tour group. He imagined them crowding the interrogation room, exchanging money, flooding the counters with passports. The guards were imagining it too, their conversation a mix of groans and anticipation. The tourists stood to one side of the striped crossing gate, taking out cameras and aiming them directly up the hill at the iron curtain. Nick and the guards stood there, zoo animals. Then, pictures taken, the tourists got back on the bus. In a few minutes it turned around and, like a mirage, was gone.
Nick saw the disappointment on the guards’ faces and wanted to laugh out loud. Nothing was wrong. An American passport, an English car-they had been the only event of the day. The tourist buses, memories of the busy months last year when the border was porous, passed them by now. It wasn’t about him and Molly. Here, in this Cold War diorama, dressed up with the old symbols, the players had nothing to do.
At last they were allowed to pass. Beyond the Czech frontier, Nick could tell the difference immediately. The road, a major one, developed ragged shoulders, asphalt crumbling away at the sides. There were no houses, no billboards, few road signs of any kind, and even the landscape itself began to look rundown, dingy and ill kept around the edges. In only a few miles they were in another world. The road became the main street of villages, the way roads did before they were highways, passing mud puddles and ducks and women in babushkas, the timeless Eastern Europe of the folk tales. There were few cars. The villages depressed Nick-peeling plaster and old electric wires and a rim of dust extending up from the bottoms of the buildings, as if the whole town had been in a bathtub that drained, leaving a ring. People looked up as the car passed. The propaganda was true — nobody smiled.
“Do you want me to drive?”
“What?”
“I said, do you want me to drive? You seem a little preoccupied.”
“I’m fine,” he said, brushing it off. “How do we contact him?” He was staring straight ahead, edging away from an oncoming truck.
“We call him up,” she said, smiling. “It’s a city. Phones. Garbage. Everything.”
But he didn’t want to play. “I thought you said all the phones were tapped.” He drove quietly for a minute. “What if he’s not here? I mean, it’s been a month. What if he left?”
“Where would he go? You can’t just walk down to Cook’s and buy a ticket.”
“Back to Moscow. He could go back to Moscow.”
“Will you stop?” she said, rolling down the window. “Look, the sun’s coming out. Spring.”
There were in fact blossoms now, not just buds, and the countryside was coming to life, as if the border had been a poison leaching into the soil. Here and there Nick saw an old manor house, a steepled church, left over from engravings of old Bohemia, but he found it impossible to imagine himself back in time. The grim present was always around them-the housing blocks of damp concrete, the dusty streets, the pervading sense that he was somewhere foreign, on the other side. He knew this was silly-an American wouldn’t be in any danger-but he felt vulnerable and aware at the same time, as if he were walking down a dark street at night. Things were different here, as arbitrary and whimsical as a policeman’s goodwill. He felt like a child. Maybe the Czechs did too, made wary and fretful by unpredictable authority. Even in the spring sunshine it seemed to him a country of shadows. They were in Prague before they realized they had entered it. In America, the skylines offered a sense of arrival, but here there were simply more houses, then street signs, red with white lettering, and tram rails, everything getting denser as they moved toward the center. They came down a long hill, running along the wall of a park, and found themselves circling a World War II Soviet tank at the bottom before the road shot off toward the river. It was here, finally, that the city opened up to a vista, Kafka’s castle high on the hill to their left, yellow buildings with tile roofs, the graceful bridges, the sky spiked everywhere by steeples.
They drove toward the cobbled streets of the Mala Strana, and Nick could see that beneath the dust and the scaffolding the city was beautiful. There was no color-no ads, no splashy shopfronts, not even the usual variety of cars in the street-so the buildings themselves became more vivid. Their Baroque facades of light mustard and green and terra cotta dressed the town. The architecture seemed to have been put down in layers, one period after another, until the unremarkable hills along the river had become an astonishing city, one of those places where Europe rises to its high-water mark, rich and complicated. Mozart had introduced operas here. In the afternoon light, the city was a painting, full of brushstrokes and perspectives and lovely forms. It was also falling apart. Up close, some of the wonderful houses were buckling, the lemon plaster torn with cracks. The scaffolding he saw seemed like a finger-in-the-dike attempt to shore up the years of neglect. The buildings, unmaintained, were slowly dying. How the Russians must hate it, Nick thought. The whole city was a beautiful reproach. The gifts of centuries were wasting away in a system that could not even produce salad.
They crossed the Vltava, past the imperial National Theater and the nineteenth-century streets of the New Town to the hotel on Wenceslas Square. To Nick’s surprise, there was a doorman and an old man to help with the luggage, a service class he thought did not exist. The room was heavy and ornate, deep red that wouldn’t show the dirt, wardrobes instead of closets. The old porter lingered, pretending to adjust the drapes, clearly expecting a tip. Their windows faced the street, and Nick could hear the tram bells outside.
“Did I give him enough?” Nick said after the man left. “He looked disappointed.”
“He was hoping for dollars. Technically, they’re not supposed to get anything, so don’t worry about it.” Molly started walking around the room, looking at it. “Well, here we are. God, I’m dead. Aren’t you? All that driving.”
Nick shook his head. “Now what? It’s still early. Should we call my-”
She put a finger to his lips, then raised it and pointed around the room.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“I don’t think so. The Alcron was popular with journalists. They all stayed here last year. So we have to assume-”
Nick stared at her, not sure whether to laugh or be frightened.
“The phone too?”
“That for sure. How about a little air?” she said, moving toward the window. Traffic sounds floated in with the spring air. When he came over, she leaned clo
se to him. “I’ll call,” she said to his ear. “Just be careful. No names. You’ll get used to it.” He felt her breath, warm and smooth, on the side of his face, and it startled him, as if she had just whispered an erotic secret. He pulled back. “What?” she said.
He shook his head, to make the feel of her go away. “Nothing.”
She went to her purse and took out a small address book, then started toward the phone. The tapping on the door surprised them both, as if someone had been watching them. But it was only a difficulty about the car, a few minutes of Pan Warren’s time, if he would come down to the desk. Nick followed the old man, feeling, crazily, that he was being taken away.
The difficulty turned out to be an extra fee for the garage-he could not park in the street. Nick was so relieved that he forgot to be annoyed. “I’m sorry for all these bothers,” the desk clerk said, and Nick found the English charming. He paid and looked around the lobby, imagining it buzzing with reporters just a few months ago. Now it was nearly deserted, an elderly couple having tea and a man hidden behind a newspaper, so obvious that Nick thought he couldn’t actually be a policeman. Outside some students were gathering in the street, walking in a half-march toward the university. He didn’t care about any of it.
She was saying goodbye on the phone when he opened the door, and he stood there for a moment, waiting and apprehensive.
“Dinner?” he said finally.
She shook her head. “Some other time. They’re busy tonight.”
Nick looked at her in disbelief, the tone of her voice, social and pleasant, making the moment unreal.
“Busy?” he said dumbly.
“Mm. A concert,” she said evenly, looking straight at him. “At the Wallenstein. We might think about that, actually. It’s pretty. What about it? Are you too tired?”
“What’s the Wallenstein?” They were going to see him.
“A palace in the Mala Strana. They give concerts in the courtyard. It’s nice. What do you say?”
“Can we get in this late?”
She pointed to the phone. “Try the concierge.” She raised her voice, taunting the microphone. “You have dollars. You can get anything you want with dollars.”
