Tomas vaulted up onto the table. His guitar was handed to him and he cradled it. Up there on the table, he looked bigger and older, less frail, his profile sharp, clean and Roman. It was a lesson to her how one’s physical appearance could convey quite different impressions just by being up on a stage.
Tomas nodded to the other two, struck up and all three launched into a wild and pulsing song. Fuddled by the vodka, she listened enraptured. The music thudded through her veins and was matched by an even more primary throb between her legs.
Lust. Pure lust. She had never experienced it in that way.
Closing her eyes, she gave herself to up to novel sensations… of being intensely alive… stripped of fear and shyness. Of being an adventurer in a new world.
Just as quickly, they changed tack. Tomas and Manicki faced other and played a sequence of melodic chords and launched into a folk song. Its melancholy, aching repetitions went down well with the party goers, some of whom looked close to weeping.
God knew how long she remained by the window – by now what she was seeing was filtering through to her in a haze. Much fondling was on display. Bodies were draped over each other, with one man efficiently unbuttoning a girl’s blouse. The music ended and Anatomie slid down from their impromptu stage. Laure’s sodden powers of analysis suggested to her that sex was what people did if they were restricted in their speech, when sensation became expression?
She was pleased with that aperçu. It was good. Profound, even.
Actually…her gaze drifted to the ceiling… actually, she could stay here all night. She was perfectly happy and not at all lonely. It was past eleven o’clock and the noise level had halved and everyone appeared to be whispering.
Tomas materialized. ‘Are you surviving?’
She indicated her glass. ‘That helped.’ To demonstrate the truth of this assertion, she took a gulp. ‘What am I doing here?’
He stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘Have you hated it?’
‘It’s wonderful.’ She hoped she didn’t sound too childishly excited.
‘Good.’
The crowd in the room was thinning. She turned and found herself almost pressed up against him. ‘Where did you learn to speak English?’
‘My father was half-English. He made sure we spoke it together. I might need it, he said.’ Tomas looked at her. ‘I think he was right.’
The vodka was swishing through her. ‘My mother was French. She insisted that we spoke it together. Lucky us. We have two worlds in our lives.’
He frowned. ‘Depends which one you’re in.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Many hoped that the better world was here. You will want to know why speaking English here can be dangerous? The goons consider it to be the language in which we plot against them.’ He kidnapped Laure’s glass and drained it. ‘What are your impressions? How do we look?’
She sensed it was an important question but was in no state to answer it coherently. She ran her fingers through her hair that – to her dismay – felt sticky with vodka (how did that happen?) ‘What I think is… what I think is that people are not talking about politics but they’re thinking and feeling it with their bodies.’ She frowned. ‘Am I making sense?’
He grinned. ‘Did you know that you look like a baby lioness? Wide-eyed but fierce, with hair that has a life of its own. My English is not that good. Please can you say what you said another way?’
She searched through the tatters of her reasoning powers. ‘You say you’re not allowed to voice certain political thoughts.’ He nodded. ‘So, if people are feeling rebellious about it, they let their bodies do the talking.’ She pointed to a couple writhing in a corner. ‘That’s rebellion.’
‘Lower your voice. Just in case.’
She did so. ‘Don’t you see?’
‘That’s why we need witnesses to how we live here.’ He brushed back a strand of the so-called lioness’s mane and her stomach turned inside out. ‘You’ll go home one of these days and you’ll be able to say what you wish. You can be a witness.’ He leant towards her. ‘In fact, I have chosen you to be a witness.’
What had happened? One minute she had been sitting next to a stranger in a marionette theatre, the next she was being recruited into a resistance.
He looked so serious, with an intense, haunted expression that she knew could destabilize every molecule of her common sense.
She said faintly, ‘Don’t come any closer.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ll kiss you.’
Oh, vodka.
‘Stop me, then.’
He placed his lips on her willing, yielding mouth and she felt her body liquify into want and desire.
Oh, goddess vodka.
‘You move fast,’ she said.
‘In this country we have to.’
‘But we don’t know each other,’ she said at last.
‘I know.’ Again, he kissed her. ‘But I argue that I do know you, you know.’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘I know you in the way that matters.’
She gave up. ‘That’s too many “knows”.’
‘That’s terrible.’ He traced the line of her jaw and she stood still, hardly daring to breathe. ‘I could tell you many things… that you’re beautiful, and almost certainly clever, and have appeared like a star on a gloomy night.’ He checked himself. ‘You look as though you don’t believe what I say. Quite right. It might all be true. It probably is.’ Again, a pause that Laure found more eloquent than words. ‘But I’m talking about another connection and you will have to work it out. That’s the best I can do.’
She swallowed. ‘That’ll do.’
His hands rested on her shoulders. ‘I must take you back.’
They had to fight their way out of the room. Everyone wanted a piece of Anatomie, and Tomas in particular. Watching and hovering, Laure concluded that the group offered a rescue remedy to which everyone felt entitled to help themselves.
‘Tomas.’ Lucia materialized out of the crowd. She held a bottle of beer and another stuck out of the pocket of the red dress. ‘Where’re you going?’
‘Taking our new friend home.’
Lucia looked from Laure to Tomas. ‘I see,’ she said in English. ‘This is stupid. Stupid.’ She turned away and slid back through the crowd.
Outside in the night street, the trapped heat from the day claimed them. Tomas took Laure’s hand. ‘I’m sorry there’s no car. But feet are good. Where do we go?’
She told him.
‘Ah.’
She was instantly aware of a change in his body language. A drawing back. ‘You know that anyone who lives there probably works for the State?’
‘My employer works for a pharmaceutical company. He’s based in Paris most of the time.’
Tomas stuck his hand in his pocket and her heart sank. Somehow, she had transgressed and she had no idea why. Eventually, he appeared to make up his mind. ‘Come along, then. Isn’t that what you say in the UK?’
Her heart lightened. ‘Something like that.’
‘I must warn you, we will be followed.’
She sent a hasty look over her shoulder. ‘Does one get used to it?’
‘Consider it an alternative universe.’ He put an arm around her shoulder. ‘That’s what we sang about tonight. Or rather, we sang about the universes we would like to be in.’
He was close enough to smell his sweat, the tobacco, the drink. None of it repellent. Rather the opposite: tantalizing. ‘I caught some English words.’
He said, ‘I told you English was subversive.’
‘Ah. I’ll whisper then.’
As Tomas led her down the street from the square and over the Charles Bridge into the Malá Strana, there was the counterpoint of someone else’s footsteps behind them. The heat in the narrower streets was close to stifling and sweat dampened her sandals and pooled in the small of her back. In contrast, Tomas paced alongside her seemingly without effort and, at the sight, Laure’s mood sw
ung between the recklessness of the semi-drunk and apprehension.
A shadow threw itself over her and she slid to a halt. ‘What’s that?’
He took her arm and pointed upwards. ‘A shop sign.’ His fingers tightened. ‘You will have to learn like all of us here not to box with shadows. We need our energy for the real thing.’ His voice softened. ‘Trust me.’
In the courtyard below the Kobes’ apartment, Tomas faced Laure. ‘Do you?’
She knew what he meant. ‘Trust you? Yes.’
He was a star and knew it, but it didn’t seem to have spoiled him. He also seemed to be someone who got things done. She liked that.
He was saying, ‘Trust should not be lightly given.’
She nodded to acknowledge the point. ‘I’ve taken you out of your way.’
‘So? Will I see you again? I’m usually at the marionette theatre. Or someone there will know where I am. Will you come?’
He seemed on edge, impatient for an answer.
She asked haltingly, ‘Lucia?’
A trace of irritation crossed his features. ‘She’s a fighter. Nothing is more important to her than our work.’
She felt herself flush. ‘Oh.’
‘Don’t worry about it. However, for the benefit of the goon over there by the archway, I do have to kiss you.’
She flicked a glance in the direction of a burly man in a leather jacket at the entrance to the street who was making a play of lighting up. ‘Kissing is political?’ She understood the position, but she was also hoping Tomas would say that it was other things too.
‘It is.’ He drew her to him, his face suspended over hers. The sweat that had seeped into the corners of her eyes misted her vision. She was trembling on the edge of hallucination.
Tomas placed his lips on hers.
His body was hot, alien, but also almost feline in its lines and fineness.
The goon watched, absorbed, probably a little excited.
Tomas pulled away in order to look into her face. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘How this…’ he touched her cheek. ‘How this has happened.’
She didn’t need to ask what. She knew. She knew.
He moved slightly and his hip jutted against hers. ‘You’ll come to the theatre?’ he murmured into her ear.
Laure pressed herself against him. ‘Yes.’
She was helpless… drink, lust?
Tomas whispered, ‘I’m going to kiss you again.’
‘Yes. Yes, you are.’
It had begun.
At an early Sunday supper in the dining room, Laure and the Kobes struggled through one of Eva’s unappetizing pasta creations.
Polite as ever, Petr wanted to know what she and the children had done that day. Laure described their trip up to the castle. ‘I had to give Maria a piggyback up the last few steps,’ she said. ‘Nearly killed me.’
‘That was kind.’
‘She held my hand coming down as I don’t like heights.’ She grimaced. ‘We’ve got a good thing going, Maria and me. We danced at the bottom. People thought we were mad.’
Eva ate slowly and, not for the first time, Laure observed a qualitative difference in her since coming home. And certainly after the disastrous delegates’ lunch.
On some days, she seemed anxious and given to rapid monologues. On others, subdued and listless. When Laure first met Eva, she had not been skinny. But not plump either. In the past few weeks, she had put on weight around her midriff and looked sallow and tired.
They ate mostly in silence.
A preoccupied Laure had no objection. Jan and Maria had been noisy all day and she was grateful for peace, any kind of peace. The pasta sauce had been made with smoked fish and was salty and pungent and she had to concentrate to get it down. After a struggle, she put down her fork.
‘Lost your appetite?’ Petr looked up from his food which he had not finished either.
‘I hope you will excuse me, but the heat…’
‘I’m sure that’s so.’
There was a flicker of humour as he said it but, as was often the case with Petr, she wasn’t absolutely sure. ‘I’m not used to it.’
It was only half a lie. Laure and heat were good friends, but she was in the grip of something more perplexing. After Rob, and the agony she had endured over his indifference, she had told her friend Jane that she was sworn off becoming even mildly diverted by anyone. ‘I’m not bothering ever again.’
Jane had called her a drama queen but Jane’s mother took her aside. ‘He’s a wazzock that one,’ she said. ‘Just you tell everyone that his organ is the size of a pin and you couldn’t find it.’
Yet, here she was, kidnapped by a sensation that wasn’t going to release her any time soon. There was a name for it: bloody, hurtful, useless sexual attraction.
Petr pushed his plate aside. ‘Forgive me, but you have a boyfriend, I think.’
Laure felt a thump of anxiety. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Avoiding Laure’s gaze, Eva got to her feet. ‘I need to check on the children.’
Laure stacked the plates – the same fine porcelain ones she had noticed on first arriving – and took them into the kitchen where she put them into the washing-up bowl to soak. She steadied herself on the rim of the sink before returning to the dining room.
Petr looked up. ‘A boyfriend?’
‘No,’ she replied.
Petr took a mouthful from a tankard on which was embossed a coat of arms. ‘I think you do.’
‘Perhaps you are muddling the terms,’ she countered. ‘A friend is different from a boyfriend.’
‘I’m aware of the difference.’ He drank more of the beer and set the tankard down with a snap. ‘I’ve been speaking French as long as you.’
But not as well. She shut herself up before the words could pass her lips, observing instead, ‘That’s a beautiful tankard’.
Petr ran a finger over the armorial cartouche. ‘It belonged to the family who used to live here. They… left it behind.’ He tapped the rampant lion quartered with stars. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
Laure obeyed and they faced each other across the table. Despite the questions, he seemed relaxed. He leant across, took her glass and poured some beer into it. ‘You really should try this. It’s part of our national life.’
Laure obeyed. From time to time, she drank with the best but this was an alien brew. ‘I don’t know much about beer but this seems… good.’
He regarded her with some amusement. ‘You’re a bad liar.’
Laure ducked her head. ‘Yup.’
He reflected. ‘I hope you’re not homesick.’ A questioning eyebrow went up and she shook her head. ‘But, if you are, you must promise to tell me.’
‘You’re very nice to me.’
He was looking down at his glass. ‘You’re an interesting person. And kind. Kindness is an expression of a healthy moral life and anyone who is good to my children, has our gratitude.’
She was embarrassed and, to counter it, she picked up the glass and regarded the contents. ‘I should warn you, Yorkshire people don’t give up easily.’
‘What else don’t you give up?’
He sounded very intense and she choked on her mouthful. ‘Lots of things.’
Petr seemed to relax. ‘I hope you don’t want to give up working here. You fit in well.’ He reached for the packet of cigarettes on the table behind him. ‘Could you pass me the ashtray?’
Laure pushed it over the polished surface of the table towards him. It was ridiculous but, in that moment, it flashed across her mind that she was inhabiting a parallel world and it was she who was married to Petr and she who occupied Eva’s place at the table.
‘So, his name?’ Petr asked.
‘Whose?’
‘The man who walked you home the other night.’
She recalled how Tomas had recoiled when she told him where she lived. ‘Am I being watched?’
Petr shrugged.
‘Many people are followed. It’s normal. We like to make sure they’re safe.’
‘Normal?’ Was she talking in a foreign language? ‘I haven’t broken any laws.’
‘Here, it’s not so such much the rule of law but the rule of men.’
Laure swallowed. ‘What are the rules?’
‘Difficult to say.’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘You’ll learn that many things in this country appear absurd.’
On this point, she was going to be stubborn. ‘But how do you know what I did?’
‘I told you. We like to make sure you’re safe.’ He sounded almost apologetic. ‘There’s one thing of which you can be certain. Beautiful young foreigners falling for rock-star dissidents end up the worse off. Rock stars, and people like them, have their own agenda.’ The subject was a little raw, not least because she had been brooding over it. But, at least, he was being tactful. ‘Those trembling new feelings, Laure, could be one-sided.’
He seemed sincere enough and she was reassured.
‘I’m anxious everything goes smoothly,’ he said.
Nothing wrong with that, she thought.
Petr traced the cartouche on the tankard with his forefinger. ‘So? His name?’
‘If you know I’ve been followed, then you will know.’ Before the words were out, she realized that, since Petr almost certainly had been informed of it, this was the wrong battle to fight. ‘Tomas Josip.’
‘That wasn’t so hard, was it? Tell me a bit more about him.’
‘I don’t know any more than you. Eva probably knows.’
There was real concern in his tone. ‘I’m responsible for you and you must look on me in loco parentis. You are under my care and I should honour that obligation. I must do so.’
Laure didn’t know what to think.
‘Did you enjoy the marionette show?’
The change of tack was a relief. ‘Loved it. The prince was… er, very charming. Before he got to the princess, he had to be rescued by a bear.’ Having just tumbled to the obvious, she paused. If the bear wore trousers embroidered with hammers and sickles, which it had… If this was Czechoslovakia, which it was… the bear represented a helpful, friendly Russia. Even if a sickle had been stuck squarely on his backside by someone at the marionette theatre with a sense of humour.
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 12
