She wasn’t being malicious, merely matter-of-fact, but the remark caught him on the raw. ‘Is that why you got me here? To make the point? Or to punish me?’
They were almost pressed together. He could feel her warmth and smell her floral scent. History and politics made for hard taskmasters – something which he had always known – but it had never been brought home so cruelly that their divisions deformed love and compassion. And, almost certainly, understanding.
They also made yearning for someone on the other side a sharp and thankless experience.
They stood up. Laure pushed back her beret. ‘You say you couldn’t have done what these people did here. No, nor could I. But he did. In his way. And thousands like him. I want you to think of him. I want you to understand something of what he went through. Before…’ She didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t have to ask who she meant.
She tapped the side of the earth shaft. ‘At least those who came here got away. They beat the system.’
Her lipstick was a beigey-mink colour which made her mouth look achingly young and tender. Even in the murky light. The way her top lip moved when she spoke and the strand of hair reminiscent of a silk skein escaping from under the beret was shamefully mesmerizing.
He brushed soil from his sleeve. ‘When it worked the system was good.’
She gave a short laugh.
‘I believed society would be better for what we did.’
That was true. For many years, it was true.
‘I accept that,’ she replied. ‘I also see it’s impossible to apologize when it goes wrong.’
The guide’s voice echoed down to them from the lip of the shaft. ‘The tunnel is two feet high and three feet wide. It had one luxury. The tunnellers had managed to string up electric lights so you weren’t forced to crawl in darkness. One escapee did get stuck and had to be pulled free.’
Beside him, Laure gave an intake of breath. ‘Even the air seems desperate,’ she murmured. ‘At least, some made it.’
‘You think of him a lot.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Not all the time, but yes.’ She paused. ‘Less, as time goes on. Of course. But he’s never not there.’
Their guide continued. ‘You could bring nothing. Only your papers and the clothes you stood up in.’
‘He’s part of my life, Petr, whether I like it or not.’
Her eyes seemed to bore into him.
Back on the surface, the wind hit them. ‘Why did you invite me?’ he asked.
‘Because I wanted you to see what you never saw.’
Astonished, he stared at her. ‘You think I don’t know?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think you do.’
It was all he could do not to grab her by the arm. ‘During the war my mother was thrown into a Nazi camp where her mother, my grandmother, was beaten to death. She told me about it. All the details. She made me promise to spend my life contributing to the general good. I agreed because I agreed with the aim and I’ve tried to do that.’
She was incredulous. ‘Communism! After everything that happened.’
He shrugged. ‘No one knows how things will turn out. Not even you, Laure.’
Her voice softened. ‘Are you admitting that it went wrong and communism and fascism have things in common?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I’m sorry about your mother. And your grandmother.’ She turned her face out of the wind. ‘Let me see. Is it the profound feeling of brotherhood that says that you must spy on everyone from morning to night? Or the upholding of equality that says only Party officials have telephones that work and get to shop in the Tuzex stores where Joe Public is banned? Or is it the fervour with which the workers perform even the most menial tasks because they believe in the general good. Or is it that they’re frightened witless?’
She was speaking so softly that only Petr could hear.
The guide was in full flow. ‘The story goes that, of the fifteen people who got through, five were from the same family, the Webers. The Stasi were clever in working out who were engaged in anti-Party behaviour.’ He paused for effect. ‘For instance, listening to, or watching, the BBC was forbidden. Of course, they couldn’t patrol the airwaves so officials would visit kindergartens and ask the children to draw their favourite television character. Little Joel Weber was anxious to obey and drew a beautiful picture of the BBC’s Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men. That was that. The family had only had a few hours to get out. The story goes that when Grandmother Weber arrived there was concern she was too stout to get through until she revealed that she had wrapped her cat up in a bag and tied it around her middle. But get through she did, dragging the cat behind her.’
Laure asked Petr, ‘Does it ever worry you that you’ve survived, and very well, and others did not?’
He bent down and picked up a stone. Rounded and very dark in colour, its hunched shape was reminiscent of a beetle. Flipping it from one hand to another, he said. ‘You have to be careful, Laure, about these things. Don’t go blundering in.’
The guide rounded off the session. He waved his arm in the direction of the building. ‘After the discovery of this tunnel and others, it became increasingly dangerous to build tunnels and dissidents trying to get out resorted to alternative methods. Some made it to Prague and got out that way. Others to Budapest.’
He felt, rather than heard, the name on Laure’s lips. Tomas.
Tomas could be added to the phantoms who lived with them: the eternal dissident, the eternal escapee. If he had been an East Berliner, Petr had no doubts that Tomas would have crawled along a rank and narrow tunnel, with earth clogging his nostrils. As a Czech, he had had to choose other methods.
The group were thanking the guide and Petr took the opportunity to tell Laure, ‘I’m leaving at the weekend.’
‘Which day?’
‘Sunday afternoon.’
She was adjusting her beret, pulling it down over her ears against the wind, and he wondered if she had heard him. ‘I’ll drop you at your hotel in the car.’
He pressed the stone that he had picked up into her hand. ‘Have this as a souvenir.’
The car was one of the embassy fleet, a bonus which he noted with satisfaction as they were more comfortable than most. Their driver seemed a solid, dependable type – but you never knew – with a short back and sides and expensive-looking driving gloves.
He drove them back close to the former East–West crossing point at Friedrichstrasse station and down towards Unter den Linden. There were cranes, delivery lorries, stacked piles of building materials, the glitter of large department store windows and, every now and again, the vista of a derelict building awaiting its restoration.
She watched him absorb this cityscape renaissance. ‘Did you ever lose the faith, Petr?’
The question rubbed him up the wrong way. ‘Are you gloating? But yes, I’ve had to change my mind because everything else has changed.’ He sent her a wintry smile.
‘At least you now have a choice as to what you believe.’
He recollected his mother who, in effect, had had no choices at all.
He wondered how much French the driver understood. ‘Capitalism is no feather bed. It’s inefficient and muddled and just as corrupt. Our system, my system, thought about people first. Yours thinks about money first.’
The car cruised alongside a major building site over which could be seen a forest of scaffolding.
‘Capitalism doesn’t rely on state repression,’ she said. ‘It puts its faith in a free press and an unbiased judiciary.’
Petr was determined to keep things on an even keel. He said lightly: ‘If you say so.’
The traffic had thickened and the car ground to a halt more than once. He craved a cigarette but refrained.
Laure asked if he had found the visits useful, adding, ‘Western companies are still probably suspicious of you.’
He leant back against the comfortable upholstery. ‘They shoul
d be. We will undercut them in drug production and those sourcing drugs for the West will be quick to take advantage.’
‘You’re a capitalist at heart.’ The minky-coloured lipsticked mouth issued the tease.
To his shame, he felt almost boneless with desire at the sight and looked away. ‘You like your joke.’
There was a long pause.
She made a noise in the back of her throat which he interpreted as disgust. ‘You were a spy for the StB under the cover of working for Potio Pharma. I didn’t know that at the time.’ She looked at him. ‘I do now.’
He touched her arm. ‘Laure, be careful with your accusations. They could get you into bad trouble.’ At his touch, she froze. ‘The StB was a plain-clothes secret police force. Not a spying outfit. Check your facts.’
She shook him off and her French grew more rapid and he wondered if it was to prevent the driver understanding. ‘You know – we all know now – it was also an intelligence and counterintelligence agency dealing with any activity which was considered anti-state or thought to be influenced by the West. You may have been working for Potio Pharma but you also worked for StB.’
She opened her handbag and produced a paper. Unfolding it, she laid it on his knee, making sure that the initial logo for StB’s masquerade company at the top of the page, which only he and his colleagues would know, was visible.
He felt himself go pale. Glancing at the driver, he said, ‘Put that away.’
‘If you answer this question. Is that your signature at the bottom?’
The driver dropped his speed and turned east into Unter den Linden.
Petr stared ahead. ‘Where did you get hold of that?’ He didn’t expect the answer and ran over the possibilities of who might be responsible – the careless or the traitorous. There were plenty of both operating in the relevant departments. ‘Was it Brotton?’
‘You don’t expect me to answer, do you?’ Laure replaced the document in her bag. ‘There is further documentation that alleges you had direct links to a unit in the StB known to have used drugs and torture to obtain confessions.’
‘I know why you’re doing this, Laure.’
‘Then we agree on one thing.’
‘Be careful what you wish for? Isn’t that another saying in your country?’
A single snowflake floated across the car window, followed by a second.
‘What happened to Tomas?’
Now, Petr understood. She wanted to obtain the information out of him on her terms.
When he did not reply, she added, ‘You owe me, Petr.’ She shaded her eyes. ‘Does it make it better if I say that it’s torture not knowing… does my weakness appeal to your better nature? It should.’
‘If that’s blackmail it doesn’t work, Laure.’
She didn’t deny it. Her lips tightened. ‘You can find out, I know you can. You have so many contacts. Old scores. Old paybacks that you can call in.’
His hand rested on the armrest, testing its padded luxury under his fingertips. ‘Tomas never goes away.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Laure. ‘And won’t. And certainly not while we know each other.’
What had happened to them in the past was too difficult to admit friendship. All the same, Petr had an idea that, on a certain level, Laure was pleased to see him.
He sighed. ‘He was arrested, but you know that. It wasn’t the first time, so it would be bad for him. That’s the sum of my knowledge. It was as it was. People vanished. All the time, Laure. You saw it.’
‘But you had a vested interest and would have made it your business to find out.’
He swore under his breath in Czech. ‘Suit yourself.’
‘You owe me,’ she repeated stubbornly.
‘Perhaps I do. But maybe you owe me, Laure. Did you ever consider that?’
Astonished, she turned back from her contemplation of the famous boulevard which the now falling snow was dusting with a cold beauty. ‘I hope you know what it’s like to feel almost mad with anguish knowing that someone you love is incarcerated.’ She said simply.
‘I do know,’ he replied. ‘Incarceration comes in many forms.’
‘Oh, please,’ she said.
They sat in silence for the rest of the journey.
The driver nosed the car into the drop-off point of the hotel. Petr leant forward and placed his hand on the door handle. ‘I leave you with this thought. You put me in an untenable position. No regime looks kindly on defectors, let alone a regime that had Russia’s hands around its neck. I was known to be employing someone consorting with dissidents. I was at risk of bringing down my family. They would have killed us. Some of us. One of us.’
‘Yet, you would allow them to take Tomas.’
‘Dog eat dog. Isn’t that a saying in your country?’
With a quick movement, she turned away and he saw that there were tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘If Tomas is dead, I want him to have a grave. I want everyone to know that he loved freedom and was imprisoned and murdered for saying so.’
CHAPTER 17
Prague, 1986
THE HEAT CONTINUED AND IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM AT THE Kobes’ apartment, the stack of clean clothes mounted. There was so much of it that Laure was forced to allocate an hour or so a day on the ironing.
She didn’t give a toss. Ironing was mindless. It gave her time and space to think and to brood over her meetings with Tomas: what he said, what he did.
She felt for him in her pounding heart. In her sleeplessness. She felt for him in her shaky legs and aching arms. The fever in her groin.
What was he thinking? And: was he thinking of her?
She tried to memorize the lyrics which he was setting to the melody he had played to her at the marionette theatre. They had been taken from a satirical pamphlet circulating underground entitled ‘The Seven Wonders of Czechoslovakia’.
‘Although everybody has a job, nobody works,’ she whispered, spraying water over the shirt with which she was wrestling. The cuff needed adjusting and a button had worked loose.
‘Although nobody works, the Plan is fulfilled up to 105 per cent.’
The water left a waterfall of moisture on the skirt of Eva’s cotton dress.
‘Although the Plan is fulfilled up to 105 per cent, there’s nothing in the shops.’
Petr put his head around the door. ‘I thought I would find you here.’
He would know perfectly well where she was. Eva and the children had gone to visit their grandmother and she and Petr were alone in the apartment. Nevertheless, she was glad to take a break. Wiping her top lip, she asked, ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘I always regret how many people ask me that.’ He sent her one of his attractive smiles and added wryly, ‘I wish people would ask me what was right.’
She nodded politely.
He leant against the windowsill. Despite the temperature, he was formally dressed in well-cut trousers and a light-blue linen shirt. ‘Have you been in touch with your mother? Does she agree to you staying on?’
‘Actually, Petr, it was my decision.’
She appreciated the boldness of that last statement, which suggested she had – finally – taken a grasp on her life. In truth, since she was only permitted a three-minute telephone call to England, it was difficult to ascertain what her mother thought but she had seemed encouraging. ‘She’s fine about it. She’s thinking of returning to France to live some time in the future.’
‘Would you mind if she did?’
‘No. I’m half French and a big part of me feels at home there.’
He seemed to approve. ‘Feelings for one’s country are a good thing.’
The iron was a heavy, old-fashioned one and, increasingly, given to spasms of rebellion. She adjusted the dial and picked up one of Maria’s frocks.
‘I appreciate that you are in a very different country here and it must be hard for you.’
Where was Petr going with this? She thought rapidly and decided to blind him with knowle
dge. ‘I understand that this is a country where a social contract between the State and the people works very well. The State promises to deliver economic growth, a high standard of living and free health care and education. In return, the population agrees to conform to the rules and regulations.’
Highly amused, he laughed. ‘Dear Laure,’ he said, ‘you really don’t have to cite such things to me.’ He considered for a moment. ‘You have left out one thing, which is the passion felt by the people who believe in this doctrine but have to work hard to deliver it.’
She glanced sharply at him. This man appeared to be so easy with himself, so kind, so undoctrinaire and, yet, he was favoured by the authorities. Also, she reminded herself, avoiding the good-humoured gaze, this was also a man who had held down his struggling, bloodied wife by her wrists.
‘Is Eva quite well?’ she asked, thinking perhaps she might get some clarity on the situation. ‘I mean, does she have bad dreams?’
‘She does.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘About that time when you saw… I think perhaps you imagined you saw something sinister.’
Laure felt herself colouring up. ‘I didn’t imagine.’
‘Eva was having a bad dream. I had cut myself in the bathroom and hadn’t staunched it when she called out.’
He was watching her reaction. For any hint of scepticism, she supposed, but she wasn’t going to give in that easily. She had seen something disturbing.
‘It’s curious, isn’t it, how one of two people can see the same event very differently.’
‘That’s true and one person usually sees it incorrectly.’
The iron gave a shriek and hissed. Petr crossed the room and snatched it from Laure. ‘Step back,’ he ordered and switched it off at the plug. ‘Are you all right?’ Laure nodded. He examined the iron’s cooling base. ‘I told Eva we should get a replacement.’ He replaced the iron on its rack. ‘No more ironing today.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Let me take you out for a cold drink before my meeting.’
‘OK,’ she agreed.
He waited until they were outside before taking up their previous conversation.
‘You know…’ he said, ‘for most people here the standard of living has never been so satisfactory.’
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 19
