Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  Half-smiling, Lenka looked up at him from the bed. Nothing tense or oblique at this precise moment. He reached down and pulled the sheet aside to expose her to the cool light of dawn. Steffie would have cried in protest and struggled to cover herself. Lenka didn’t move, just lay there beneath his gaze, imperfect and erotic, and so unlike Stephanie as to belong to a different gender altogether. Lenka had a body; Steffie had a figure. Lenka had a scent; Steffie had perfume. Steffie’s perfume was alluring enough—something floral, hints of jasmine and citrus and sandalwood—but Lenka’s scent was different. Ripe and dark. Something sour, astringent. Mammal, organic. He recognized it from someone else, the first woman he had ever loved when he was young and naive. She had been a generation older, a strange, wayward woman who had taught him passion but not constancy. Standing over Lenka, he felt that familiar stirring. Lust? Love? Something beyond words, expressible only by actions.

  “Do you want?” she asked. She could see that he did. There was no disguising what was happening. But time was pressing. “I’ve got a meeting at nine.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “Her Majesty’s envoys work tirelessly to protect the realm.” He didn’t know how to do that in Czech or Russian without it coming out like a piece of Stalinist propaganda rather than the irony he intended, so he said it in English, which meant Lenka rather missed the point. He sat on the edge of the bed and put out a hand to touch her, just her face, the line of her chin, almost as though to define it.

  Where, he wondered, do we go from here? And then he turned the thought into words before he had a chance to censor them. “Where do we go from here?”

  She sat up, pulling the pillows behind her, unashamed of her nakedness. Her gaze was narrow, as though she was trying to see right through his eyes and read what was going on in his mind. “You’re worried about your girlfriend?”

  “Not only.”

  She reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. “Ah, you think maybe I am an informer. Maybe I work for the StB?”

  He smiled. “I doubt it, but you might. Diplomats always worry about that kind of thing. Should I be doing this? Is it a set-up? In the proximity of women we’re worse than priests.”

  “If you’re a priest, then I’m a nun.”

  Was that a joke? It was difficult to tell. Her manner was strange, oblique at times, startlingly direct at others. Perhaps it was just her unfamiliarity with spoken English. She put her cigarette to her mouth and lit it. A skein of gray smoke appeared between her lips. He had already discovered many of her tastes, and that was one of them, the faint, acrid flavor of tobacco on her mouth.

  “You can’t be a nun. Nuns don’t smoke in bed.”

  She laughed now, real, smoky laughter that took a moment to disperse. “So, if I am not StB, you ask where do we go from here? But it is not we, is it? It is you. Where do you go from here? Because you are thinking of your girlfriend whose name you have not yet told to me.”

  “Steffie. Stephanie, actually.”

  “That is Štěpánka in Czech. It is beautiful name.”

  “Better in Czech. To me it sounds very English.”

  “And is she very English?”

  “Very.”

  “But I am not, and you are wondering about the difference. Did Stephanie sleep with you the first evening you spent with her? I expect she did not. So, does that make me, what? A prostitute?”

  No misunderstanding there. One of the universals. Prostitutka in both Russian and Czech, and probably every other language under the sun. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t think like that at all. We both did it, me and you together. Our choice.”

  “But that is how men are, you are thinking. And women aren’t. They should be saving themselves, like Štěpánka did.”

  They were hovering on the edge of their first argument. “Rubbish. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

  “Ha! Then everything is all right. If we want to stay together, we stay together. If we want to go to bed together, we go to bed together. If we want to go away, we go away. Is that all right?”

  “It seems logical.”

  Logic appeared to satisfy her. Logic was good. She sat there in his bed, on his side of the bed, looking as prim and determined as it is possible to be when you are entirely naked. “So, are you going to tell me about Štěpánka?”

  He tossed the sheet over her knees to cover the disturbing sight. “Some other time. Now I must get a move on. Make yourself some coffee if you want. There’s stuff for breakfast. Cereal, toast, anything you find.” He went to the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth, trying, and failing, to rid himself of the thought of her. When he came back she was in the kitchen, laying out breakfast things, pouring coffee. She was wearing her shirt from yesterday and nothing else: bare legs, faintly dusted with golden hair, bare feet and, as he discovered as she reached up for something from a top shelf, bare arse. She’d made toast. There was butter in a dish and she had discovered a pot of Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. “This is very English breakfast, isn’t it? But I cannot find sugar.”

  “The maid hides it. She thinks there may be shortages and we should keep it hidden.” He opened the cupboard under the sink and took out a carton of sugar.

  Lenka had stopped what she was doing. Her expression was transformed to that of angry primary school teacher—a frown, lips pursed. “You have maid?”

  “Goes with the job. Like the flat itself. She only comes one day a week. To clean the flat and take my laundry.”

  “That is very bourgeois.”

  “We are pretty bourgeois in the Foreign Office.”

  “I’ll bet this služka she works for StB.”

  “She probably does. It’s better always to keep your enemy close, where you can see him.”

  “Close? Do you fuck her? Once a week?”

  “Certainly not. They tried an attractive one but I had to send her packing. She didn’t know how to iron shirts.”

  “So what is this ugly one’s name?”

  “Svetlana.”

  “There!” Her tone was triumphant, as though the matter was certain. “You cannot get any more Russian than that. She is maybe KGB.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later he let her out of the flat, making her take the back way, out through the courtyard and the abandoned garden at the back of the building, where there was an ancient wall twelve feet high with an anonymous door that gave on to one of the alleys running down to the river. Once she had slipped away, Sam strolled through the Malá Strana to the palace that crouched warily beneath the Castle and housed the British embassy.

  8

  In the secure room deep within the embassy, an exclusive little group took its seats at the conference table. The secure room was not a cheery place. Windowless bare white walls, bleak fluorescent lighting, metal and plastic furniture. It was known as the mortuary.

  “Heard from the lovely Stephanie?” the Head of Chancery asked Sam. Eric Whittaker had that knack, bestowed on highflying diplomats, of being able to talk trivia while preparing for matters that matter. “So sorry to see her go.”

  “I had a card from her—Greetings from Cologne, wish you were here sort of thing. She was staying with friends at Rheindahlen but she should be crossing to England by now.”

  “We’ll miss her. Easy on the eye. You two still”—a moment’s hesitation—”together? Madeleine always said you were perfect for each other.”

  “I used to think so too. Steffie has always had doubts.”

  “Frightened of becoming an embassy wife?”

  “Enough to put anyone off.”

  Whittaker laughed, glancing round the meeting. There was a distinct feeling of Saturday morning. One member of the group was even without a tie. Whittaker coughed in that apologetic manner of his, to bring the meeting to order. “I’m afraid,” he announced, “that H.E. cannot be here this morning—hobnobbing with the Yanks, I believe—so I’m in the hot seat. And”—he glanced at the papers
before him—”hot it certainly is.” He tapped the paper. “So, what is this place, Čierna? Never heard of it myself.”

  “Čierna nad Tisou,” someone said. “Eastern Slovakia, right on the Soviet border.”

  “Anyone been there?”

  The fluorescent lighting of the secure room hummed thoughtfully. People waited for someone to contribute. Rather diffidently, Sam offered his own experience. “I have, as a matter of fact, Eric. Back of beyond, really. Little more than a rail terminus.”

  “Rail terminus? What on earth were you doing there, old chap? Trainspotting?”

  There was a stir of amusement at the table.

  “If you remember, Eric, you sent me on a fact-finding tour of Slovakia when I first got here.”

  “Good God, I’d quite forgotten. What on earth had you done wrong?”

  Laughter. Sam inclined his head, as though acknowledging applause. “But the rail terminus is actually rather interesting. It’s one of those forgotten corners of Europe, close to the point where Ukraine and Hungary meet with Slovakia—I believe geographers call it a tripoint—and there’s this enormous railway terminus with over nine hundred sidings. Makes Clapham Junction look like Adlestrop.” He looked round at his audience. “I’m sorry, am I boring you?”

  “Not yet,” Whittaker said, “but I bet you’re going to.”

  There was further laughter. “I fear I already am. The problem is, Russian railways have a broader gauge than the rest of Europe, which means that every single trainload that crosses from East to West or West to East—goods, passengers, even politicians—has to transship from one gauge to the other at Čierna. It makes for the most fantastic bottleneck, so much so that a few years ago they even built a broad-gauge spur over a hundred miles into Slovakia, just to bypass Čierna and ferry Ukrainian iron ore to the steelworks at Košice.”

  The military attaché felt the need to contribute. He was a major in his final posting before retirement and was always conscious of being out of place amongst the diplomats. Perhaps he thought that Sam was trespassing on his territory. “It is worth pointing out that Russian armed forces have to do exactly the same thing when moving westwards—tanks, armored cars, all materiel, in fact, has to be brought to Čierna nad Tisou, offloaded and either transferred to road or to another train. Wipe out Čierna and you block the way to the West for the Red Army.”

  Eric raised his eyebrows in that infuriating manner he had when spotting a red herring swimming through the pond of his meeting. “But we’re not talking about war, are we, David? At least, I hope we’re not. We’re talking about Dubček and his partners in crime being summoned to a meeting with the entire Soviet Politburo at this godforsaken railway station. Why on earth, one wonders, choose this place?”

  Sam said, “I think the Czechoslovaks are most reluctant to meet outside their own borders at the moment. If you’re riding a tiger you don’t want to ride it into the tiger’s own den.”

  “To stretch a metaphor.”

  “Beyond its breaking point, I fear.” More amusement at the table. He and Eric were good together, Chancery putting on a show of irony and self-deprecation, qualities that had once been a standby of such people through centuries of empire and now seemed equally well adapted to Britain’s lowered status in the postwar world. “At the same time, Comrade Brezhnev appears a little nervous about being seen in Czechoslovakia. I understand the Russian train is due to be shunted across the border to Čierna in the morning for talks, and then, in the evening when the discussions are over and they’ve had a jolly dinner with the fraternal comrades, they’ll be shunted back to Russia for the night. That’s what we gather.”

  “You’re not serious? They’re frightened of spending the night in Czechoslovakia?”

  “Something like that.”

  They digested this piece of news in silence before Whittaker spoke again. “We can only await developments, I suppose. And hope that common sense prevails. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to a report that comes, unattributed and unattributable, of course, from the Friends.”

  The Friends, everyone knew and no one mentioned, were those enigmatic individuals who rooted around in the shadows of events like dogs raiding dustbins in a back alley, and came up with what they called, oxymoronically at times, intelligence. They were an inferior species to the true diplomats, inferior yet somehow enviable. It was hard not to have grudging admiration for the rather stout fellow who was their particular Friend, a man of no apparent consequence and even less significance, but who was here or hereabouts all the time, pretending to be responsible for cultural affairs while reporting not to His Excellency, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, but rather to a man in Century House on the Thames in London, a man who was head of an organization so secret that even its true name was secret, a man who himself was only ever known, in the manner of the worst spy thrillers, by a single letter—C.

  “This is, of course, most secret,” Whittaker said, adding in one of his familiar parentheses: “I do so hate the word ‘secret.’ It always sounds like an invitation to tell all.”

  The stout man remained impassive. Others round the table smiled knowingly. “Just a straw in the wind, really, Eric,” the man said. “Nothing to get too excited about. It seems that SIGINT has detected attempts by Russian forces to cut telecommunications from Prague to the outside world. Just brief moments of blackout. Probably trials.”

  The little group, couched in its sealed room, was silent. Whittaker raised an eyebrow. “SIGINT?”

  The man looked crestfallen. “An acronym, Eric. Sorry. Signals intelligence.”

  “Ah. An Americanism, no doubt.”

  “I fear so.”

  “But not really an acronym sensu stricto. More an abbreviation.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Eric. Anyway, it seems possible that these blackouts are some kind of rehearsal. If the Warsaw Pact forces were to intervene—”

  “—invade.”

  “They would wish to move in beneath an electronic blanket.”

  Whittaker nodded wearily. “So that is the background against which the Czechoslovak presidium is meeting with Brezhnev and his henchmen at”—he glanced hopelessly at the papers in front of him—”Trainspotters’ Delight.” There was more amusement round the table, the laughter of relief. “How do you divine the mood on the streets, Sam? You seem best equipped to give us the lowdown. To use another Americanism.”

  Sam thought of Lenka and her friends. “There’s a kind of bloody-minded insouciance about the activists. If they do invade, so what? Armies cannot defeat an idea whose time has come. That seems to be the general feeling.”

  “Sounds like flower power to me,” the major said. “Armies cannot defeat a crowd of hippies. Unfortunately it’s not true. There could be a lot of blood.”

  “Somehow, I doubt it. The Czechs…” Sam hesitated. It was the kind of statement that you made with caution. You needed to phrase it exactly right. People might quote him. “…are pragmatists. It’s not for nothing that Good Soldier Svejk is their hero. They know when not to kick against the pricks—but how to deflect them instead. Look at what happened in 1938. Or rather, what didn’t happen. Had they fought, the country would have been destroyed and this city would have been left in ruins.”

  “Not got the stomach for a fight,” the major said briskly.

  Sam turned on him, still thinking of Lenka, but now imagining her lying in the street with blood on that elegant Slavic face. “Look what happened to the ones who did fight. Look what happened in Warsaw during the war, or East Germany in fifty-three or Hungary in fifty-six.”

  Whittaker sensed tempers rising. “Let’s hope common sense prevails,” he said pacifically. “As always we must hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And to that end, I want to circulate this proposal for how we might look after the best interests of families and auxiliary staff in the event of a Soviet”—he hesitated—“interference in local affairs. Cont
ingency planning, that’s all. Just in case. Naturally, I wouldn’t like this information to get out of these four walls lest it cause more upset than circumstances deserve…”

  The typewritten sheets went round the table. There was a hasty scanning, some suggestions, nods of approval. “And in the meantime we have our Members of Parliament doing the rounds. Where exactly are they now, Sam?”

  “I believe they are in Pilsen this morning. This afternoon it’s a glass factory.”

  “It’s always a glass factory.”

  “And then in the evening there is an informal party hosted by your kind self. And Madeleine, of course.”

  * * *

  After the meeting Sam searched out the stout little fellow who was everyone’s Friend. Harold Saumarez. Could he have a word? In strictest confidence?

  Of course he could. Perhaps a breath of fresh air in the garden? Where, it was understood but never mentioned, they would be out of the hearing of any hidden microphones. So they strolled across velvet lawns where the ambassador held a summer garden party, assuming the weather was kind, to celebrate the QBP, the Queen’s Birthday Party, symbol of British insouciance abroad.

  “Just a word in your ear, Harold. In strictest confidence, of course.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that.”

  “Shows how important it is, doesn’t it? There’s a name I’d like to have checked out, you see. Someone I’ve met recently. One Lenka Konečková.” As they walked they tried to keep their faces averted from the balustrade of the Castle high above where, so the rumor went, expert lip-readers attempted to oversee conversations in the gardens of the British embassy below and interpret what was being said. He even put his hand to cover his mouth as he spoke the name. “Twenty-five years old. Calls herself a student. Does some journalism, occasional work for the radio, so she says.”

  Harold raised what were, by any standards, heavy eyebrows. “Personal interest?”