Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “You want to look the driver in the eye as well. Make it personal. That’s rule number two. You’re a girl, so take advantage of it.”

  “I told you, I don’t want that kind of lift.”

  “Come on, Ellie. All he’ll want is a grope.”

  She turns on him, but at the very moment that she’s about to loose a stream of invective, a van slithers to a halt in the lay-by. “Hop in,” the driver yells through the window, and James is opening the door and shoving Ellie and the rucksacks across the seat before she can utter a word. “Dover,” James says across the sodden, furious figure sitting in the middle of the bench seat. The driver, a callow youth with prominent Adam’s apple and rodent teeth, slams the vehicle into gear and accelerates back into the stream of traffic. He’s chewing gum and smoking and scratching his groin, all these things at the same time as driving. It takes concentration, a degree of slick skill. “You going abroad then?”

  “France, Germany, Italy. Maybe Greece.”

  He grins at them. “And you’ve had a row already?”

  11

  “About last night,” she says. They’ve bought tickets, had something to eat in a greasy-spoon café and then boarded the ferry and waited for it to depart, all without broaching that most delicate of subjects. Now they are on deck looking back over the ship’s wash to where low-lying cloud throws a wartime smokescreen across what might be the white cliffs of Dover fading into the night. The lounge they have abandoned is like a refugee encampment, littered with squalling babies and arguing adults, dominated by a large, loud American extolling the virtues of the latest film to anyone who will listen and many who are trying not to. “You’ve gotta see it,” he is insisting. “It’s just ace. This little guy Hoffman. He’s a real star.”

  Out on deck it is quiet and cool. The rain has stopped.

  “What about last night?”

  He senses rather than sees her indifference. “I’m sorry, that’s all. Just…I don’t want to rush into anything.”

  “Bloody Kevin again.”

  “Perhaps.”

  There is silence between them but not around them. Around them, beneath them, is the sound of the ship and its way through the water. It pitches and shudders like an old lady confronted with something not altogether pleasant. Deep in its bowels is the rumble of machinery. He wonders what she thinks of him, while she wonders what he thinks of her. Neither offers the other much in the way of clues. Should he take her hand? It seems mad. They’ve kissed a bit, and now he doesn’t know whether to take her hand or not.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “Tomorrow morning we’ll be in France—”

  “Belgium, actually. Zeebrugge, remember?”

  “Only because you insisted, because it was cheaper.”

  “My mother brought me up to be careful with money.” He waits. “You were different with your parents, you know that? From what you’re like at Oxford.”

  “Different how?”

  He can’t quite say. A hint, a feeling. “Obedient,” he suggests. “Wanting to please.”

  “That’s why I try to get away from them. Isn’t it the same with you?”

  “You’ll have to come oop North and find out.”

  “That depends on whether we survive this trip.”

  We, he thinks. What exactly is this collective? Does it even exist outside the limits of this journey? And in the spirit of scientific exploration he decides to attempt to find out, turning towards her and taking that hand and ducking down to kiss her on the mouth. There is a moment’s hesitation, just the fragile touch of her lips, and then she moves towards him and her mouth opens and for a moment there is the vibrant dance of her tongue against his.

  She pulls back and moves away, turning back to the sea, her face in profile.

  “What does that mean?” he asks.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.”

  “Isn’t it a signifier?” The word seems to startle her. Maybe he isn’t meant to know things like that.

  “What on earth have you been reading? Derrida?”

  “Some crap about semiotics.”

  “Well, if anything it’s a floating signifier. It means everything and nothing. What you want it to mean.”

  “I want it to mean you really fancy me.”

  “But maybe that’s not what it does mean.” She laughs and gives him a little consoling nudge in the chest. “Come on, we’d better go inside and find somewhere to sleep.”

  12

  A Flemish dawn insinuates itself into the early morning. Ellie peers, bug-eyed from lack of sleep, through the salted window of the lounge. There’s a smear of sea and vague shapes of coastline and harbor. “Where in God’s name are we?” she wonders out loud.

  “Zeebugger,” says James. They take turns to guard their rucksacks while the other goes to wash in the overcrowded bathrooms. The ferry docks with a clanging of steel and a blast of ship’s siren.

  Outside on deck the air is cold. It has a different quality from the air they left behind at Dover, a strange hint of foreign, a sense that they are on the edge of a continent that stretches to the Mediterranean, to the Urals, to Finisterre. No longer marooned on an island, encompassed by an island’s limitations. Here, anything is possible. But is that sensation just an illusion? After all, there’s nothing much to see, just the industrial desert of Zeebrugge that lies all around the docks like children’s toys abandoned across a concrete playground. Could be anywhere. Thames estuary. Merseyside. Tyneside.

  Ellie huddles against him for warmth, which is good. He puts his arm around her and smells her hair. A warm, maternal scent that doesn’t quite match the girl herself, who is brittle and filial. Below deck engines are being started. On the quayside men are waving instructions. Foot passengers begin to file off the ferry like the infantry of an invading army, each trooper bowed beneath the burden of his or her backpack. All that is missing is the weaponry.

  “Foreign soil,” James says portentously as he steps down off the gangway. Not really true. Foreign concrete, more like. “The first time,” he adds.

  “The first—?”

  “—time abroad. That’s right.”

  “I don’t believe it—”

  “We ‘aven’t all got t’brass you ‘ave,” he says, putting on his phoney Yorkshire accent to amuse her. They stump along a quay, past vehicles already queuing to drive on once the ferry had been emptied.

  “Look,” Ellie says pointing. “Ringo.”

  “Ringo?”

  “There.” In the queue of cars is a VW Beetle bearing the name on the bonnet. A face watches them from the driver’s seat as they walk past. A pretty little girly face. Blonde and blue-eyed and rosebud-mouthed. “Ringo. For a Beetle. Now is that funny, or just naff?”

  “What’s naff?”

  Ellie affects surprise. “Don’t you know anything? You are, my dear, you are. So where do we go now?”

  “South,” he says, not caring if he is naff, feeling, for the moment, like Ernest Shackleton but without the icebergs—an explorer making his first, tentative steps in unexplored territory, although a slow plod through the purlieus of Zeebrugge, passed by overloaded cars bearing GB stickers on their rear ends, doesn’t quite match Antarctica.

  “Why’s no one stopping?” Ellie demands petulantly.

  “Because they’re bloody full. Can’t you see? And they’re English, which means they’re on holiday, which means they’re not going to pick up hitchers in a foreign country.”

  They pause to examine the map that they bought in Dover. “We’re here,” he says, pointing. “And that’s where we want to be, at the Ostend to Brussels road.”

  Ellie launches into a silly game, ratcheting up her accent to sound like an army officer in a 1950s war film, stabbing the map with a spiky finger. “We are he-are and Jerry is they-are.”

  “Piss off,” he tells her. She sulks. He folds the map away and they plod on through the early morning, Ellie stumping on ahead as though she isn’t with him.
He watches her, liking her and loathing her at the same time; a strange combination of emotions. Spoilt brat, is what he loathes. What he likes is more difficult to explain—something about the sharp flights of her mind, her knowledge and her self-confidence. On the ferry she told him something about the weeks she spent in Paris last May, sleeping on someone’s floor, going out during the daytime to throw cobblestones at the CRS and spending the evenings at a student bar with music and beer and hash. She was even arrested and spent a night in a police cell with half a dozen other girls. In the morning she was let go because she was British and they didn’t want the bother of dealing with the embassy. That Ellie seems like an emissary from another continent, far from Yorkshire, far from England even.

  * * *

  The countryside south of Zeebrugge is flat and dull, smeared with rain, named with Zs and Ks: Dudzele, Zuienkerke, and the hip Koolkerke. Only “Bruges” is familiar. “Let’s go to Bruges,” Ellie calls over her shoulder. “I’ve heard it’s lovely.”

  “I thought we were going to Italy. If we stop off at every place that—”

  “All right, all right.”

  Cars pass by full of smiling families off on their continental hols, but the one that does stop isn’t one of them. The driver is on his own, an undistinguished man as gray as the morning. He winds the window down. “Autostop?” he asks.

  “Er…no,” James answers.

  “Yes!” shouts Ellie, running back. “Yes! We’re doing autostop. Autostop means hitching, you idiot.”

  “I thought it meant our car had broken down.”

  Gratefully they clamber into the car.

  “Where you go?” the driver asks.

  “To Italy. And Greece.”

  He laughs, as though Italy and Greece are figments of the imagination, like the land of Cockaigne. “I only go to Oostkamp. I drop you on the Brussels road. Maybe there someone take you to Italy.”

  In the car they examine the map again, Ellie leaning over the front seat and reaching out to trace a line past Bruges, past Brussels towards Luxembourg and the Rhine. She looks up with a sudden grin, as though a single lift of no more than a few miles has made all the difference. Her face, rubbed plain by lack of sleep, is suddenly immensely desirable. Not a spoilt brat at all. “Hey,” she says, looking at James with that intensity of gaze that she has, “we’re on our way. And you’re really not naff.”

  * * *

  Throughout that morning they move through the Flanders landscape, elated by their successes, stunned by tiredness, and, in James’s case, thrilled by the novelty: foreign road signs, foreign place names, foreign cafés and shops. Even the design of houses. How could you make something different out of a row of terrace houses constructed of bricks and mortar? Yet the Flemish had achieved that very thing.

  On the outskirts of Brussels they take a tram with a conductor sitting behind a desk just inside the door, dealing out tickets with a mangled stump of a hand and complaining about life to anyone who will listen and many who won’t. Around them people talk in a blizzard of French, and, to James’s surprise, Ellie talks back at them. “Skiing holidays,” she tells him by way of explanation. “And summers in Juan-les-Pins.”

  “Sounds posh.”

  “How could I help it?” she asks, as though it had been some kind of indignity that her parents subjected her to.

  They leave the tram at the end of the line and walk through the last, characterless suburbs. On the south side of the city, other hitchhikers stand like anglers on the banks of a river waiting for a bite. Some hold up cards with their intended destinations, as though these might attract their prey. James knows what to do here—walk upstream and take whatever is coming just to get away from the crowd. And soon enough Ellie lands a catch, a Peugeot driven by a young man in a gray suit who might be a traveling salesman. “Namur?” he asks.

  “Namur ça va,” Ellie replies because it is okay; almost anywhere in the general direction of south is okay. They clamber in, triumphant, and set off. Dull, terrace houses, a supermarket and a filling station give way to farmland. A sign announces Waterloo and shortly a great mound rises like a Neolithic tumulus out of the farmland ahead. People are gathered at the summit beneath the statue of a lion. “You want to see?” the driver asks.

  He parks the car amongst the tourist coaches. There’s a memorial stone telling anyone who bothers to read that La Butte du Lion was constructed by some king or other to celebrate the fact that his son, Prince someone or other, was wounded during the battle.

  “Typical imperialist crap,” Ellie decides. “No one gives a shit about the slaughter of common soldiers, but they built a bloody great monument like this because Prince William got knocked off his horse.”

  “You’re judging the past by the standards of the present.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m judging it by the standards of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.”

  “So you’d bring the guillotine back?”

  “Some people deserve the guillotine.”

  Arguing, they climb the steps up the side of the mound while people coming down push past. Up on the top, in the shadow of the pedestal, a cool breeze blows. An information board gives the layout of the battle. It is weather-beaten like the battlefield itself, the colors faded, the names—Napoleon, Wellington, Blücher and all the others—partly worn away. They look from the board to the landscape before them, to the shallow slopes of farmland that at the time meant such a lot. A mile deep and a couple of miles wide, that’s all; a few square miles of open fields and scattered woods, with an occasional farm. James tries to picture the chaos of an early nineteenth-century battle: drifting palls of musketry smoke; the scythe of canister shot; comic opera uniforms; horses plunging and whinnying. Europe tearing herself to pieces, as she always seems to do.

  They go back down, arguing the merits and demerits of Napoleon. Was he a little Hitler? Or a great civilizer of Europe? Revolutionary or dictator? About Wellington Ellie has no doubt: duke, prime minister, reactionary bastard. He’d have gone to the guillotine, and deserved it.

  The driver listens to their argument as they drive back to the main road. “Who gives a shit?” he says.

  13

  Namur. Bastions, ramparts, the slippery flow of a great river. Beneath the city walls they stop to buy a newspaper and write postcards. James notices that Ellie’s postcard home is addressed solely to her father. A bleak missive: We’re fine. Hope Mother is OK. Love, Ellie. The newspaper runs stories about the war in Vietnam, about disturbances in France, about dictatorial colonels in Greece. A long editorial asks whether Russian forces will invade Czechoslovakia as they did twelve years ago in Hungary.

  * * *

  Beyond Namur the countryside changes. No longer the dull flats of Flanders but now a crumple in the continent’s mantle that gives rolling hills and woods. Their lift drops them in the main square of Marche, an ordinary little town where they find a brasserie with tables outside under the trees. They sit in the afternoon sun and drink dark, slightly sweet beer. The map shows that they have done almost one hundred and fifty miles.

  After buying bread and charcuterie they set off in evening sunshine along the road to Bastogne. The countryside has a mellow, timeless quality to it, spacious and open, as though no one could do it any harm. Towards seven o’clock they stop at a farmhouse and Ellie is pushed towards the door to communicate with the natives. “Bonsoir, Madame,” she says to the woman who answers her knock. “On fait l’autostop vers l’Italie. S’il vous plaît, avez-vous un endroit où on peut mettre la tente?”

  The woman’s face is stolid as a potato. She turns and calls to someone inside.

  “What did you say?” James asks.

  “Is there somewhere we can pitch a tent?”

  The woman turns back. “Une canadienne?”

  James is indignant. “Canadian? No! Je suis English. Anglais!”

  This brings laughter. “Shut up, James,” Ellie says. “Oui, Madame. Seulement une canadienne.” Ther
e’s a brief discussion, a waving of arms and a pitying smile in James’s direction accompanied by laughter from the woman. At that moment a little girl emerges from the shadows of the house and, with great solemnity, leads them round the back. “Voilà la cerisaie,” she announces in a piping voice, pointing beyond outhouses to where there’s an orchard, placid in the evening sunshine, the trees laden with fruit. Cherries. A cherry orchard.

  Ellie dumps her rucksack on the ground. “How very literary,” she says. “Or is that lost on you?”

  “Everything’s lost on me. What was all that about being Canadian?”

  “A canadienne is a tent, you berk.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Camping,” Ellie admits reluctantly. “With the Guides. We went to a jamboree in Vence in the south of France.”

  “You were a Girl Guide? For fuck’s sake! And you told me all that crap about camping on the lawn with your brother.”

  “That was true. The tent on the lawn was true.”

  “But you never mentioned the Guides, or jamborees or anything like that. What were you? Brown Owl?”

  “That’s Brownies.”

  “It’s all the same. Bloody silly games. How does a Girl Guide light her fire?” He dumps his rucksack beside hers and looks at her questioningly. “Well?”

  “I don’t know. How does a Girl Guide light her fire?”

  “She rubs against a Boy Scout.”

  “Ha ha.”

  He unrolls the tent in the long grass beneath the trees: a strip of bright nylon with rings and cords and zips attached.

  “Orange,” Ellie observes disparagingly, as though orange is a color that has long been out of fashion in the tentage world. Naff, maybe.

  James tosses a small bundle of aluminium poles onto it. “Go on then—show us how you do it.”

  “You think I can’t?”

  “Show me.”

  In a few minutes, beneath the grave eyes of the little girl and with disconcerting skill, Ellie has the tent pitched. Cautiously she unzips the entrance and peers in. “Am I meant to get in there with you?”