Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  Sam was sure it was. He managed to move the conversation away from such matters on to the personal. What might she do once she’d finished her studies? Travel abroad, improve her spoken English, perhaps in London. There were possibilities now the shackles of the past twenty years were being thrown off.

  Sam tried to picture her in London. What might she ultimately become? A writer? An academic? A full-time journalist? That kind of thing was imponderable, whereas Sam’s fate was altogether clearer: he would soon enough be Head of Chancery in some forgotten ex-colony, married to Steffie, with two children and a mortgage on a house in Surbiton that would be suitable for the retired ambassador he would inevitably become. Maybe he’d even acquire a K: Sir Samuel Wareham. Terrifying how quickly the options closed down. One moment the world seems your oyster; the next you see it for the mollusc it really is—an octopus that has grabbed you with its tentacles and will not let go.

  “At least now I’d get an exit visa,” Lenka said. “Now things have changed for the better. You see, with my background I was lucky to get to university.”

  “Why lucky?”

  Her mouth twisted in distaste. “Politics. Now everything may be different, but however hard they try to rewrite it, they can’t change history.”

  “What history are you talking about?”

  “My family’s.” She attempted a smile, that ironic, Iron Curtain smile that Sam had long ago come to recognize. “Let’s talk about other things. Maybe I’ll introduce you to my mother sometime and then you can find out. But not now.”

  So they talked about other things, and it was easy enough—the new freedoms, the freedom to write what you liked, report whatever concerned you. Food came and went. They had a bottle of Moravian wine which was not as dreadful as usual, and she wanted to know about London, swinging London, Carnaby Street, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. Hippies. Hash. And then himself. Why exactly was he taking her out to lunch? He’d never said, the first time she asked.

  “Because I find you attractive. That’s not a sin, is it?”

  “It all depends. You say you have no wife.”

  “No.”

  “And is there no girlfriend?”

  He hesitated with the tense. “There was. She’s called Steffie. She works for the Service, although she’s not a diplomat.” He tried to pretend it was of no importance, but there was the snake-like slither of guilt running up his spine. He’d had a letter from her that morning, a brief but heartfelt missive enclosing a postcard of Cologne cathedral. Having a lovely time, wish you were here, was scrawled on the card. The letter said the same thing, but without the irony: Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hasty, she had written. It’s being apart that makes me understand how good we are together.

  “She was posted back to England.”

  “And your heart is broken?”

  “We didn’t break up exactly. It’s just…” Momentarily, he felt himself floundering beneath her steady, interrogator’s gaze. Blue eyes, narrowed against the light. “It’s always been a difficult relationship. When you are on post, when you meet such a limited range of people, things are always difficult. Artificial, I suppose.”

  “And now?” It was a challenge, and he deflected it.

  “Now you must tell me about yourself. That’s only fair.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “No boyfriend?”

  “There has been. Not recently. Not serious, anyway.”

  “What’s serious?”

  “If they matter to me. One did. He played in a group. You know? Guitars, pretending to be The Beatles? We were together a couple of years. Since then…” She let her voice trail away into silence.

  For dessert they had the inevitable palačinky, pancakes, with a sharp cherry filling and too much whipped cream. Sam glanced at his watch. “Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got to get back to the office. People to see, minutes to write.”

  “Of course.”

  “Perhaps I can see you again?”

  “Why not? There is—I do not know if you are interested—there is a concert coming up. My flatmate is in the orchestra so I get tickets. You met her—Jitka.”

  “Of course.” He thought for a moment, riffling mentally through his social diary and deciding that no one would notice if he didn’t turn up to the reception at the Swiss embassy to celebrate what? Their national day, presumably. Madeleine would notice but she could go hang. “Yes, that’s fine. Where? What time? Maybe we can get something to eat afterwards.”

  Again that shrug. “The House of Artists. At six. On the steps. There will be others there. Friends.”

  6

  The concert. A scrum of people going up the steps into the auditorium, and Lenka grabbing Sam’s hand to lead him through a side entrance and up stairs to one of the balconies. “You’re with the poor students now, Mr. Diplomat,” she said. They shuffled sideways into narrow seats. He was introduced to some of her friends, faces that were familiar from the political meeting—the Barboras and Terezas, the Mareks and Pavels. There was a buzz of excited conversation as they peered down on the audience in the body of the auditorium. “There’s Smrkovský,” someone said, and everyone craned to look at the tough-looking man taking his seat in the stalls.

  “Do you know who he is?” asked Lenka. It was hot up there just beneath the ceiling. Her forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat.

  “I’m political, remember? Of course I know him. I’ve even met him.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Talked with him. For about three minutes.”

  “So what do you think of him?”

  Sam considered for a moment. Far below people were pushing and shoving to get a moment’s contact with the man. He smiled round, shaking hands. A pugnacious, genial face, a short brush of gray hair. A member of the Central Committee of the Party, he was one of Dubček’s closest associates. “I think you’re looking at a man riding a tiger. You know about riding a tiger?”

  “Hard to get off?”

  “Exactly.”

  People applauded. The applause began close to Smrkovský and spread out like a wave in a pond until everyone in the auditorium was clapping, from the stalls to the gods, until the man was settled into his seat. More applause greeted the orchestra as it filed onstage. Lenka pointed. “There’s Jitka. Second violins, next to the bald-headed man. I rent a room in her flat.”

  Down amongst the penguins Jitka seemed transformed from the febrile woman of the political meetings into an elegant lady in a black evening gown. There was the sense of her beauty, even at this distance. But then, you so often had a sense of beauty with Czech women, at whatever distance you might choose. After a few minutes the conductor appeared, bobbing and weaving like a footballer through the ranks of players. He bowed to the audience and turned to the orchestra, holding out his hands to calm the storm of clapping. Then, when a perfect silence had been achieved, he raised his baton and unleashed the first crashing, portentous notes of Blaník, the sixth and final of Smetana’s cycle of tone poems, Má Vlast. It wasn’t on the program, that was the point. The program, on a roneoed sheet handed round amongst Lenka’s friends, had Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances and Martinů’s Sixth Symphony, not pieces of music that would have stirred Sam’s interest very much. But here, without warning, were the familiar tones of Blaník sending a pulse of excitement through the hall.

  Má Vlast, My Homeland. Patriotism without kitsch, an almost impossible trick to pull off. Blaník tells of the legend that Václav, Good King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol, a kind of Bohemian King Arthur, waits beneath the Blaník mountain with a company of knights, ready to emerge and save the Czech people at their moment of greatest need, when they are threatened—legend has it—by four hostile armies. We may savor the bitter irony of that now, but then, on that hot summer evening in Prague, the music seemed a clarion call to the nation. The Russians, the East Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians would all be defied. Holding hands, the Czechs and the Slovaks would move for
ward into the sunlit uplands of freedom and prosperity. Socialism would show its human face to all mankind.

  The audience listened transfixed throughout and, at the crashing end, stood as one to applaud. Lenka’s eyes were bright with tears. There was sweat certainly, sweat and tears mingling on her cheeks. Sam dared to put up his hand to brush them away and was blessed with a wry smile.

  * * *

  After the concert they all went—Jitka the violinist and half a dozen others—to a place on the river where a quartet was playing cool jazz. There were tables outside under the trees and food was served till late. Laughter, argument, beer in the warm night, the kind of thing one dreamed of even in socialist Czechoslovakia, especially in socialist Czechoslovakia now that it was finding this thrilling, novel freedom. They were joined after a while by the Strelnikov character himself, Jitka’s husband, Zdeněk. He greeted Sam with enthusiasm. “My Englishman. I like my Englishman,” he said. The talk was a blend of practical politics and speculative philosophy. Names were bandied around—Lukács, Marcuse—and concepts that bore names like reification and alienation. Sam felt old, an emissary from another generation. “What do you think?” they kept asking him, hoping for an optimistic answer. He did a great deal of shrugging, verbally and literally. He had exhausted this kind of talk when he was at university, and working for the Foreign Office had killed any residual idealism there might have been. Where do our best interests lie? was the watchword of the diplomatic corps: pragmatism elevated to a political philosophy.

  “Mr. Wareham is a cynic,” Lenka warned. “He doesn’t understand the power of an idea.” She was holding on to his arm, tethering him to their earnest conversation as though otherwise he might float up in the warm air and go sailing away over the river and the city like a golem, back to the West perhaps. It pleased him, this display of ownership, this assumed knowledge of the workings of his mind.

  “I’m a realist,” he said.

  They laughed at that. “You haven’t lived here long enough,” Zdeněk said. “No one can live in this place for long and still believe in reality.”

  One of the group had a camera. While they talked he moved around them taking shots—close-ups, figures seen through beer glasses, candid shots. They laughed and made faces and got him angry because they weren’t taking his art seriously. When Sam produced his own camera—a neat little Japanese compact he’d bought duty-free in Berlin—there was even more laughter. “Tourist!” they called, as though it were an insult. But he managed to get them to pose more or less sensibly for one shot. The flash gave its milliseconds of brilliant, zirconium flare and held the group in stark immobility on the retina of any watchers and on the film itself.

  When it was time to go—the musicians had packed their instruments away, the waiters were stacking the chairs—the group of friends broke up, as such groups do, with promises and exhortations, with kisses and embraces, with awkward last-minute discussions on the pavement of the embankment. There was a moment when Lenka might have gone with Jitka and her husband, but then the moment was past and the couple had gone and Sam and Lenka were alone, walking together towards the bridge. He said something about his car and driving her to Jitka’s flat, wherever that was, but nothing was decided. Holding hands, talking about not very much, they walked across the river, over the Charles Bridge between the two rows of grimy statues that made it seem like walking up the aisle of a church. Ahead was the altar of the nation, Hrad, the Castle, lifting its shoulders to blot out the night sky. Lights were on up there, officials at work in the engine room of the ship of state, desperate to avoid the icebergs ahead, while down here two people were negotiating the first moves in a relationship. In the secluded cobbled square in front of his apartment building he stopped, keys in hand, beside his car. “My flat’s just here. Do you want to come up?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.” The “of course” was curious. He unlocked the outside door and led the way upstairs. Why should this be so easy? With Stephanie it had taken weeks, circling round each other like animals as likely to kill as to love; but this was so straightforward. They both knew where they were going and why.

  “Nice place,” Lenka remarked when he opened the door to his apartment.

  “Goes with the job.” He showed the way through to the sitting room. “Do you want anything? A beer? Coffee?”

  “A glass of water,” she said. “And the bathroom.”

  “Of course.”

  Why was everything “of course’? Was it all so obvious, preordained and inevitable? Ineluctable. One of those words with no antonym, no “eluctable” to make things easy to get out of. Maybe the word should be invented, for the benefit of diplomats.

  When she came back there was something scrubbed about her face, as though she had stripped it of all artifice. Perhaps she had just taken off her makeup and brought her appearance back to how she’d been when they’d first met. It gave a vulnerable cast to her expression, made her look rather plain but somehow more attractive. Wide jaw and high, Slavic cheekbones. Pale blue eyes. A face that had come a long way, out of the Asian steppe thousands of years ago to end up here in his living room with the view of the bridge out of the window. He knew this was fanciful nonsense but the conceit pleased him.

  They kissed, gently, thoughtfully, exploring each other’s taste and texture, eyes watching. Steffie had always closed her eyes when kissing. She’d seen it done like that on the films, but Lenka watched him closely all the time, as though measuring him up, assessing what his intentions might be. “You don’t have to get back to Jitka’s?” he asked.

  A small smile. “Are you looking for an escape? I have my own key.”

  He put some music on—that Janáček piano music seemed appropriate—and led the way into the bedroom. They undressed, rather shyly at first, watching each other cautiously. If he had expected passion and frenzy, that was not what he got. Instead they lay on the bed touching very gently, moving slowly, watching each other’s eyes, sensing how things—heartbeat, expression, breathing—change. How bodies can be measured and vibrant, as though under a great tension, like the strings of a cello.

  * * *

  Afterwards, they dozed, touched each other again, dozed, kissed, dozed again. Sam realized, amongst many other things, that he felt unconscionably happy. It cannot last, he thought.

  And then he slept and so, presumably, did she.

  7

  When he came back from the bathroom in the cool light of dawn Lenka was awake. Her face seemed blurred with sleep, the features ill-defined, her hair a chaotic cloud across the pillow. “What’s the time?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “It’s early. Come back to bed.”

  He stood, looking down on her. Already regrets were coalescing in his mind. What did a night like this mean? What did it mean to her? What did it mean to him? He knew how dangerous it all might be. Diplomats were warned about it time and again, warned of blackmail, warned of beautiful women who will flatter a man’s self-image and wheedle information out of him. Swallows, the Soviets called them, swallows, with its hints of what they might do to you, and, correspondingly, what you might do as a result—swallow them hook, line and sinker. It was worse if you were queer—they’d find pretty boys who’d suck your cock while the film cameras whirred away behind one-way glass mirrors. Look at Vassall. A clerk in the naval attaché’s staff in the British embassy in Moscow, he had been famously set up by the KGB, famously photographed pleasuring and being pleasured, and was now famously languishing in Wormwood Scrubs. Of course, Sam told himself, he was running nothing like that kind of risk. No wife to worry about. No heavy-handed policeman to arrest him for indecent behavior. As Eric Whittaker, his boss, had memorably observed, “If you’re going to blow your nose, for God’s sake make sure that the handkerchief is clean.” Well, Sam’s handkerchief, folded and pressed, had certainly been clean enough up to now because Stephanie was British and worked at the embassy. The worst that might have happened was a raised eyeb
row from the ambassador’s wife and a suggestion from the ambassador himself that Sam make an honest woman of the gel. Which would have meant Stephanie resigning her job, the archaic ways of the Foreign Office insisting on the spinsterhood of its female employees. But that hadn’t happened. The ambassadress had said nothing, while he and Stephanie had spent three months more or less together before she got that posting back to London that she couldn’t turn down because her mother was unwell and she was needed to help her father deal with the problem. Aged parents, an only child. It wasn’t easy. The intention was to keep in touch and catch up when Sam got back to London, which would be in eighteen months.

  In the meantime, what would happen to their oblique, tense relationship, based as it was on emotions never fully expressed and intentions never fully articulated?