‘Don’t bother,’ said Tomas. ‘I find it more peaceful not using a phone.’
Laure watched his exit. ‘How did you know he would speak English?’
‘They often do. A tool of the trade.’
They didn’t stay long after Major Hasík had gone. Laure handed over what money she had on her, and Tomas made up the difference. ‘Sweet, lovely, generous Laure,’ he said. ‘One day, I’ll do the same for you.’
After he had paid, he tucked his hand under her elbow and took her down to the river where they walked along the embankment.
One or two cafes were shutting up shop. The smell of summer water filtered up from the river as Tomas kissed her, resting his hand on her breast. Astonished by the power of her response, she pressed herself against his narrow torso.
She felt… she felt… what? Very gently, Tomas smoothed one of her eyelids with his thumb and murmured something in Czech. Her flesh was on fire and she knew that she had got herself into something which was political and sexual and very complicated – and her heart sang at the idea.
On the way back to the Kobes’ apartment, Tomas asked if she had a bank account in England and did it work. It did, she replied and described Brympton’s high-street bank flanked by potted geraniums and its women tellers behind the counter who wore white blouses and eye-poppingly bright lipstick.
‘Nobody watches you when you go in?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You could put in money, or take it out, and no one would ask questions?’
‘In general, no, it’s absolutely private. Why do you want to know?’
‘Am I asking too many questions?’
‘No.’
He reached for her hand. ‘Be wary, sweet Laure. I could be an informer.’
She gave an uneasy laugh. ‘I didn’t imagine for one second that you were.’
Tomas laughed too. ‘You have just demonstrated that you’re not a Czech.’
‘Or Slovak?
‘Slovaks are Slovaks.’ He came to a halt. ‘Look at me, Laure. What do you see?’
‘Someone who ate half my dinner.’
All those months ago, desiring Rob Dance was to be permanently ravenous, but the sensations she experienced then were as nothing to the ones that consumed her now.
Tomas’s hands hovered over her shoulders as if he couldn’t keep his hands off her. ‘Do you believe what you see?’
‘Must I?’ Did she trust her own responses? ‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘How old are you, Tomas?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
He looked and seemed older.
‘You?
‘Twenty.’
He smiled and moved closer. She inhaled tobacco and fresh male sweat and her heart leapt and her senses flamed.
It was at the close of an early evening performance when Tomas next turned up at the theatre.
In the interim, Laure had thought about him ceaselessly – which made her impatient with herself as she didn’t want to be at the mercy of her feelings. She didn’t want to be watching out for Tomas like a lovesick teenager. Or to have every nerve ending stand up whenever he was around. She didn’t wish to spend her free time cataloguing every physical characteristic in excruciating detail. Hair, hands, turn of the foot.
Or his mouth which was so expressive and frequently smiling. At her.
Standing in the shadows over by the exit, Laure observed the children’s reactions after the yellow curtains had jerked shut. Admittedly, some were taciturn, but most had been set alight by the performance and their excited treble chatter dominated the bustle and noise of the audience’s exit.
A hand slipped into hers and she jumped.
‘Missed me?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Only maybe?’ His fingers closed tighter over hers. ‘That’s not so good.’
She wanted to ask where he had been but stopped herself. She was not going to be the needy, begging thing that she had been with Rob Dance.
‘I’ve been out of town,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t leave a message.’
He had been thinking of her after all. She swallowed. ‘I’ve been busy too.’
‘I want you to meet someone,’ he said. ‘Can you come?’
‘Give me fifteen minutes.’
The marionettes stowed, and the costumes packed up, she joined Tomas at the entrance where he was talking to Lucia. At Laure’s approach, Lucia waved a hand at Tomas and moved off.
Laure turned to Tomas. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To see someone I’m fond of.’
The heat claimed them as Tomas piloted her through the streets towards the old Jewish quarter and stopped at the entrance to a large apartment block on its perimeter. His hand in the small of her back, he guided her inside. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain later.’
Inside the lobby an elderly, black-clad woman sat at a makeshift desk. At Tomas’s entrance, her head bobbed up and Laure was aware of a hard gaze directed at them both.
The hand on Laure’s back tensed.
‘Tomas Josip,’ said the woman. The tone was hostile.
Tomas steered Laure towards the staircase. ‘Up,’ he commanded, overtaking her.
Laure cast a swift look over her shoulder. The woman was now writing in a large ledger.
‘Comrade Concierge,’ Tomas said in a low voice over his shoulder as he ran up the stairs. ‘She rules the street like all the concierges. They are the backbone of the State, feeding in information. They get drunk on information. They spy on their children. But pity the person who drops cigarette ash on one of their staircases. I’m a decadent.’ He panted slightly as they hoofed up a third and narrower flight of stairs, up to the top of the building. ‘She hates me. The great delight of her life is to report on me. The bugger is, she’s incorruptible. Most of them like to be slipped a gift. This one doesn’t.’
Laure was fitter than Tomas and caught up with him. ‘Don’t you wish for better,’ she cried, ‘than being spied on by old women?’
‘Shush,’ he turned around and placed a hand over her mouth. ‘Shush.’
Obediently, she lowered her voice. ‘I want better for you.’
He balanced precariously on the stair above her. ‘I believe you do.’
‘I know it’s none of my business. But I can still wish you didn’t have to bribe everything and everyone.’ She looked up at him. ‘And you were free to write your songs.’
‘That’s your freedom.’
She frowned. ‘But not yours.’
‘I like the idea. I love the idea. But I live here.’
She said stubbornly, ‘It doesn’t stop me wanting it for you.’
His face softened. ‘Come here.’ She hopped up to his step and he pulled her close. And on that narrow wooden staircase, Tomas bent over and kissed her to within an inch of her life.
Would she ever forget? The feel of his mouth on hers? The fight to keep balanced? The staircase spiralling beneath them?
She repeated. ‘I won’t stop wanting it for you.’
‘Don’t stop trying,’ he said in Laure’s ear. ‘It’s wonderful to be cared for. To have someone care, I mean. I love your stubbornness.’ His mouth found the soft place under her ear. ‘I love your freshness. Your sweetness. Everything about you, in fact.’
She put up a hand and cradled the back of his head. If it was possible to die of happiness, or emotion, she was dying.
‘Come.’ He took her hand and led her up the final few stairs to a door that looked a recent addition.
Tomas rapped on it and it opened to reveal a pale vitamin-starvedlooking man of forty or so. He beckoned them inside to an attic where there was a tiny passage with a couple of doors leading off it.
The place smelt of illness – a hint of germicide and urine – and was dark and claustrophobic.
‘This is my cousin, Pavel,’ said Tomas. ‘He looks after my great-aunt who we’ve come to see.’
A rapid conversation in Czech took place and Tomas grew seri
ous. He asked some questions in Czech and drew Laure aside. ‘My great-aunt has been taken ill. I didn’t know.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m sorry but I’m afraid it would be best if you left. Will you be able to get back on your own?’
She nodded. With obvious relief, Tomas turned back to Pavel.
As she made her way downstairs and past the snooping concierge, Laure reflected on the ironies. She belonged to Tomas in a fundamental way, of that she was sure. Even after such a short acquaintance she was sure. Quite sure.
But she did not belong to his world.
CHAPTER 14
Berlin 1996
IN HIS HOTEL ROOM OFF THE ALEXANDERPLATZ, PETR Kobes dressed with his usual care for the evening reception. Suit, pale-blue shirt, silk tie. The tie was from Paris and one of his favourites.
His room was on the fourth floor of one of the newly built hotels which had sprung up since the reunification of East and West Germany. The view from it was of a city landscape pitted with old bombsites and unlovely former communist blocks of flats. One good thing was the number of flourishing trees, now in their winter livery. These, Berliners informed him, were the replacement for those chopped down during the war and its aftermath when it was feared no tree would ever flourish in the city again.
The telephone by his bed rang and he picked it up.
‘Just checking up on my old dad,’ said a voice.
His daughter, Maria, was calling from Paris.
Petr sat down on the bed. ‘Could we have less of the old? Forty-six is still a teenager.’
They spoke in French, rather than Czech, which had become the habit between them. He pictured her, almost certainly fiddling with the ends of her hair, which she had grown long, and almost certainly smoking a French cigarette to which she had taken with gusto.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly. ‘Enough money?’
Nineteen-year-old Maria was at the Sorbonne to study politics and economics and Petr was conscious that even now, years later, his daughter’s grief for her mother ran deep and inconsolable. During the good periods, Eva’s spirit embraced them as a containable, even benign, memory. In the bad times, it was as impenetrable and unforgiving as the Golem haunting the streets of old Prague.
‘Are you serious, Dad? No one ever has enough money in Paris.’ She changed her tone. ‘Of course, I’m fine. It’s me checking up on you, remember.’ There was a pause. ‘You know we will be doing communism this term. I’ll be ringing you for the inside info.’
At his end of the phone, Petr raised an eyebrow.
‘Dad, you do still believe, don’t you? Or has it all gone? The ideals, the methods, the benefits?’
The notion that he had spent his life and energy in the service of an ideology which was generally considered to have feet of clay saddened and depressed him. But perhaps that was what courage was all about? Knowing that something might not come good but still being prepared to put your future on the line?
How did his children feel about his life and work? Unsure of their hidden political sympathies, he was careful not to question them in case sides had to be taken. But he did remember, word for word, the letter that his former au pair, Laure, had sent him on her return to England.
‘If you give up on the freedom to think, then your being will dissolve drop by drop. But, at least, that won’t happen to Tomas, whatever you may have done to him.’
The letter was bitter and unforgiving and always caused him pain whenever he thought about it. Yet, and this always touched him to the quick, the parcel in which she had sent it included a hot-water bottle for Eva. Hot-water bottles were hard to obtain in Czechoslovakia and Eva had been fond of them. He could not quite understand why he acted as he did but, having got the letter out of the clutches of the censors, he destroyed it. But not the hot-water bottle.
‘I still believe in its aims,’ he replied, with a stab at the fervour which had once propelled his actions. ‘These are good and true. I’m a Party man, through and through. But that doesn’t mean that the Party should ignore the need for change.’
‘Spoken like a diplomat.’
The bargain had been forced on him on his sixteenth birthday, made as he faced the unknown man in a beige mackintosh and a pork-pie hat. Five minutes previously, this stranger had knocked on the door of his parents’ rooms in the Malá Strana and asked to speak to Petr Kobes.
‘I am he. Your name?’
‘It’s of no importance.’
Without asking permission, the man placed his briefcase on the table. The briefcase was made of good leather and looked new and Petr eyed it curiously. Not many of those around. The nameless visitor opened it and passed papers over to Petr. ‘You need to read and sign these.’
‘Why? What’s in them?’
The focused gaze from under the pork-pie hat told Petr that it was unwise to ask questions.
‘You will be working for us,’ was the reply. ‘We have been observing you and you are considered the right material. Signing will give your formal permission. We like to have matters documented.’
‘But—’
‘If I were you, no “but”s.’ The stranger’s gaze moved around the room that doubled up as kitchen and living space, taking in the empty shelving, the patched lino flooring, the two-ring gas hob, the tin kettle and, eventually, came to rest on the door behind which his ailing mother was sleeping. ‘You will be needing to get hold of your mother’s medicine in the future.’
Petr still didn’t reply.
‘I don’t expect you would enjoy military service much either,’ the stranger added.
Everyone in Czechoslovakia knew that those sorts of statements contained a threat that could last for a lifetime and it was mad to ignore them.
After he had signed, the man produced a package from the briefcase. ‘Chocolates for your mother.’
Petr could not remember when he had last seen a box of chocolates, if ever, and they riveted him. This, of course, was their point.
The man nudged the chocolates into the centre of the table where they rested, incongruous in gaudy tinsel ribbon. ‘We will continue to observe you,’ he said.
He replaced the papers in the briefcase and left as unobtrusively as he had arrived, bearing with him the blueprint for Petr’s future.
On cue, the door to his mother’s bedroom opened. ‘I knew they would come sooner or later.’
A suspicion ignited.
Petr whipped out a chair and eased her down into it. She had been – still was – a beautiful woman but one whose experiences during the Second World War in a Nazi war camp had left her pretty much a physical wreck and her gait was unsteady. He knelt beside her. ‘Did you do this?’
She cradled his face in her hands. Since she lost several of her teeth in the camp, she rarely smiled but she permitted herself one at that moment. ‘My son.’ She allowed the words, pregnant with love and tenderness, to fold him in an embrace. ‘This is the best thing for you.’
Somehow – God knew how – she had got hold of some scent and he smelt its faint, violet fragrance on her wrists which he would for ever associate with her. ‘How do you know what’s best for me?’
He knew his mother. She was, and ever had been since the defeat of Fascism, convinced, that in choosing communist values to guide her life, she was right. ‘Communism is the morally acceptable way, the only way. It is the only position capable of achieving goodness.’ She released his head but kept a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know you so well, Petr. You must keep a watch on your thoughts and desires. If you ever find there’s a gap between the Party’s commandments and your own wishes, you will be ready to clamp down on them. Consider them as bourgeois weaknesses.’
He thought of the implied threat to her medication. ‘They’re bullies.’
She skewered him with a ferocious intensity. ‘They will look after you.’
Petr knew of old that this was how it would be. A pang went through him – for the relinquishing of something irreplaceable. His freedo
m to choose. ‘It will be at a price, I think.’
She shook her head. ‘Not so.’
‘You’ve packed me up into a convenient parcel.’
He anticipated what was coming next. The crippled, twisted legs under her patched skirt (which must have been at least fifteen years old) trembled. ‘You must always remember that communism is the absolute opposite of Nazism and you must never doubt it. Only yourself.’
He knew, his father knew and she knew, that the psychological and physical damage she had suffered had not only destroyed her health but left her struggling to think well of human beings.
‘Sometimes,’ she said of those memories and the consequences, ‘I can’t fight them. But they won’t kill me.’ Yet, in a sense, they had.
She registered Petr’s disquiet. ‘Don’t worry.’
So, in that moment, ensnared by his love and an even more powerful pity, he permitted his mother to take away the freedom to make his own choices.
In the cupboard that did duty as his bedroom and smelt of damp rot and the results of his furtive wanking, he spent a sleepless night. At one point, his hand crept towards his crotch but he stopped himself. He needed to exert control, to stifle the flare of rebellion, and to plan. Towards dawn, it occurred to him that his future would never have been any different and it was best to make a virtue of necessity. Knowing his fate, he would be the more powerful, the more effective and, perhaps, the freer for it.
It was his business to believe – and believe he would.
The decision made, he fell asleep.
The State looked after Petr and, in return, he became word perfect in what was required.
The Státní Bezpecnost, the StB, trained him in the covert and labyrinthine. These methods were to be put into practice wherever operatives were deployed which could be in industry, in medicine, in politics. Or, even as the lowly shopkeeper.
Keep your mouth shut and never raise you head above the parapet.
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 16
