Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “Wasn’t it like that with the Boy Scouts? You get inside the tent and they get inside you.”

  “Don’t be so crude. I didn’t sleep a wink on the bloody ferry, and now this.”

  “This is all right. You can sleep like a baby, in my arms.” He pulls out his sleeping bag and unrolls it inside the tent. Called by the woman, the little girl has disappeared. They are left alone with their paltry meal and their tent. Fando and Lis. On the road to Tar.

  “We haven’t got anything to drink,” Ellie complains.

  James pulls two bottles of beer out of the side pocket of his rucksack. They have foil round the neck, like miniature champagne bottles. “Here you are. I got them on the ferry.” He glances at the label. “Stella Artois. Never heard of it. Not the kind of thing a red-blooded Englishman would be happy with, but beggars can’t be boozers.”

  “If I want a pee?”

  “I thought you were a Girl Guide. Just wander off into the cherry orchard and commune with nature.”

  “Sounds like Chekhov.”

  “Easier in those days.”

  “Easier?”

  “Long skirts and no knickers.”

  “They wore knickers!”

  While they are arguing about that the little girl returns, silently bearing a large paper bag full of cherries like an offering to the gods who have blessed her with their presence. “Merci beaucoup,” is all that James can manage, which seems paltry under the circumstances. “Merci, merci. Très bon,” he adds despairingly.

  The little girl laughs and runs off to tell her mother about the strange man who can’t really talk properly. Ellie is delighted with the gift. Perhaps it fits in with her idea of the generosity of the peasant class. “How kind. And it saves us having to steal them.”

  So they sit together at the opening of the tent and eat their supper of bread and rillettes with cherries to follow. It is almost idyllic. Mainly Ellie talks, that quick, energetic talk, of what she thinks and what she intends, of how the day has gone and how she doesn’t really care about sleeping in a tent. “Actually,” she concedes, “it’s quite fun.”

  They take it in turns to wash at a tap on a nearby outhouse. Teeth are cleaned, armpits self-consciously splashed.

  “Now what?” James asks. He blows up the airbeds, lightheaded with the effort, then pushes them into the tent and stands up. The sun is setting, brushing peach and apricot into the cherry orchard. It is beautiful in the way that the ordinary can be beautiful. Just somewhere nondescript in Europe, in a cherry orchard amidst farmland where armies once tramped. And the tent is there between them, something between a double bed and a single coffin lying beneath the trees. Ellie dives inside. “I’ll tell you when,” she calls from within.

  He waits. Noises come from inside the tent, of movement, of things being taken off and stowed away. “Come,” Ellie says, peremptorily. He unzips the entrance and peers in. She’s sitting cross-legged at the far end of the space, bathed in light strained through the fabric of the tent, shades of ochre and amber. She’s wearing a T-shirt and underpants and a smile; before her is what’s left of the bag of cherries and a tin of Gold Leaf tobacco.

  “Welcome to the tent of ungodliness,” she says.

  He crawls in to face her. What, he wonders, is expected of him? He struggles to take off his jeans in the confined space, and when he has finished and has sat himself opposite her she opens the tobacco tin. Rizla paper and mossy shreds of tobacco. The scent of something other than tobacco seeps into the close air, mingling not unpleasantly with the smell of socks and sweat. A pungent, earthy amalgam. He watches as she rolls the mixture into an expert cylinder. Her tongue emerges from its lair to moisten the margin of the paper.

  “What’s that?”

  “A smoke.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You’ll try this, though.”

  Understanding dawns. “You brought that with you? Through customs?”

  “Relax.” Her smile is part amusement, part contempt, wholly challenging. A match flares and she takes a drag. Her inhalation isn’t perfunctory as with a cigarette. Instead she pulls the smoke in and holds it, breath suspended, eyes closed. The smell spreads through the narrow space, dark and fierce.

  “You’re mad.”

  She laughs. “You’re a virgin. Here.” She holds the thing out, damp at one end, smoldering threateningly at the other. “Let me take your virginity. Have a couple of tokes and then…”

  “Tokes?”

  “Drags.”

  “Then what?”

  A faint giggle. “Then we’ll see. Go easy. Don’t want you to puke. Not in here.”

  He takes the proffered joint, puffs at it and coughs. The smoke bites his throat. He feels his heartbeat rise. “This is stupid.”

  She shakes her head, taking the joint back. “It just is. Trouble is all the adjectives we use. Adjectives kill things. Good and bad, moral and immoral, stupid and clever. It just is, James, it just is.”

  The thing, the joint, the spliff—neither good nor bad, neither stupid nor clever, neither moral nor immoral—goes back and forth, briefly to James, rather longer to her because, she repeats, laughing again, he is just a virgin and shouldn’t take too much. His head starts to swim. His throat burns and he feels both sick and happy at the same time, a strange, disjointed sensation. Within the tent the orange light glows more vivid, as though the two of them exist within the compass of something organic, pulsing with blood. “Is that good?” she asks and he agrees that, yes, it is good in its own, unusual way.

  “You see?” she says, and he does see. He sees things very vividly, the precise shape of her sitting there a few feet away from him, flushed orange. Eyes wide and black. Lips black. A pout that is somewhere between surprise and amusement. Her bony knees up against her chest and the scribble of hair on her shins. The form of her toes that are unlike any toes he knows, which isn’t many, to be frank, but hers do seem unusually long, as though they might be able to grasp at a branch. Prehensile toes. A lemur, with those toes and those wide, black eyes. He laughs and coughs and the joint burns down and she produces a small pair of eyebrow tweezers in order to hold it to the bitter end. “There,” she says as she takes her final puff, as though she has proved something by the whole exercise, something about his naiveté and her wisdom and experience. Smiling vaguely—is there a joke that she might share with him?—she puts the tweezers away and closes the tobacco tin. Then she lifts her hips and slips her underpants off. “Now,” she says in a matter-of-fact voice, lying down and parting her legs.

  All he knows is things that are entirely physical—a swelling, a pulsing, the sensation of imminent explosion, a cloud of something like ecstasy filling his brain. Is this real? Is he, James Borthwick, really there? Is Eleanor Pike really there, stretched the length of the tent, longer laid out than her height when standing, the shadowy ochre of her legs and belly almost filling the whole crepuscular space? Or is she just a figment of his imagination? He touches her as though to make sure, feeling the dense texture of her skin, exploring the hard edge of her pelvis, stroking the silken plume of hair. His finger slips in. He tries to say something but she hushes him to silence. “Just that,” she whispers, “just that.”

  So he crouches over her while she pivots slowly on the axis of his finger, turning and twisting, lifting her hips up and down, even, at one point, issuing instructions—”Slower, slower, keep it slow”—but mostly just emitting small exhalations that are almost musical in their pitch and intensity. And after a while—a long while when measured by the indolent clock that ticks inside his head—the music begins a crescendo, tempo and volume rising until she is convulsing and crying out like someone in pain. Then the pain or the pleasure or whatever is over and there is only grief left, grief and tears as he climbs on top of her and she twists her hips away, holding him and moving her hand so that he reaches his own paltry climax on her belly and has to scrabble for a handkerchief to clean up the mess. She turns away from him and his apolog
ies and after a while there is the blessed palliative of sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning they barely speak as they pack up the tent, as though insults have been traded and arguments left unresolved. When he asks if she is upset, she pretends indifference. “I’m fine.”

  When all is ready and their little camp is no more, they knock at the farm door to thank their hosts. The farmer’s wife invites them into her kitchen and offers them coffee with fresh bread and butter. They laugh and joke with her, or at least Ellie does; while James watches with something close to jealousy, that this unknown woman should be able to talk to Ellie whereas he cannot. That he could share the closest intimacy and yet can barely exchange pleasantries. Then they pat the little girl on the head (had she listened to the noises in the night?), say goodbye, shoulder their packs and set off on the road to Bastogne.

  * * *

  They pass occasional tanks on the roadside, old Shermans, painted the color of shit and mounted on concrete plinths as memorials to what happened here a quarter of a century ago, the Ardennes counterattack, the Battle of the Bulge, the last ferocious assault by the German army on the advancing Western Allies before the Rhine. Rolling hills and scattered woodland rise ahead of them, a mellow landscape that is difficult to imagine in winter, in the cold and fog of war. Now it’s a lackluster summer Sunday, with the few cars that pass full of families out for a meander round the countryside. No lift seems likely.

  “Where do we go from here, Ellie?” James asks.

  “Luxembourg. Isn’t that the idea?”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  “It’s what you asked. Where do we go from here? You asked it.”

  “I mean us.”

  “Ooz?” She says it with a faux Northern accent.

  They walk on. He knows the danger of pleading. Instinct warns him. “It’s just that after what we’ve done…”

  “What have we done? I was stoned, you touched me up, I gave you a wank. Does that make us married?”

  Cars pass by. Frustration rises with the temperature of the day. “You know your trouble, James?” she says. “I thought you were honest working-class but actually you’re just bourgeois like everyone else.”

  “I’m not working-class or bourgeois. I’m just a bloke.”

  “A bloke? Being a bloke is as bourgeois as you can get.”

  14

  Luxembourg. One of those privileged city statelets that European history has allowed to survive amongst the big boys. Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, cunning dwarfs who have succeeded in getting by in a world of giants, this one perched on rocks above a gorge. From towers, walls, bastions, bridges it regards two sweating hitchhikers with regal indifference. Lifts are few, shops are closed, businesses suspended, the Luxembourgeois are living up to their name, being both luxe and bourgeois, by going to church en famille and afterwards eating vast lunches that undoubtedly involve pork and potatoes. Ignored by them all, Fando and Lis climb up into the old town and find a pavement café where they dump their rucksacks and sit under a plane tree and drink beer. James unfolds the map. The German–French border, a fault line in the structure of Europe, meanders its way south from where they are. They debate the relative merits of left or right, east or west, Germany or France, Saarbrücken or Metz. It is like playing snooker, trying to think ahead, trying to judge where you should be one shot after the next. For the moment Ellie seems content as she traces the possible routes. When she is happy it is wonderful, like the sun coming out.

  “Let’s toss,” she suggests. “I’ve always liked the idea of running your life by the toss of a coin.”

  “Or a dice. Throwing a dice.”

  “A die. One die, two dice.”

  “Pedant. Anyway, we all die.”

  “It’s a good idea for a novel. Using dice to govern your life. And at the end, you die.”

  “Called what?”

  She thinks for a moment, frowning. “Alea iacta est. The Die Is Cast. No, The Dice Man Cometh.”

  “The Tosser,” he suggests, and wins her laughter. She is, he decides for the hundredth time, entirely lovely like that. No makeup, her hair in disorder, her features strongly shaped, giving her a look that is a fraction older than her real age. Unusual in a girl. He feels like a younger brother at times, which is not what he wants.

  “Well, go on then. Toss.”

  He takes a coin from his pocket, a half-crown that still lies there amongst the Belgian and Luxembourg francs he has already collected. He holds the coin poised on his curled forefinger, his thumb cocked beneath.

  She stops him. “Wait, there’s another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Sunday. Crap hitching, you said so yourself.” She looks round the little square. “We could stay the night here.”

  “Where?”

  “Not in your bloody tent. A hostel perhaps, or a pension.”

  “Heads we stay, tails we move on.” The coin rings out, flickering in the sunshine, and comes up heads.

  * * *

  The auberge de jeunesse is in the ditch below the city ramparts, down by the river, with a railway viaduct looming over the roofs. It’s an ancient, dank building that might once have been a factory of some kind. “Looks like one of the Yorkshire mill towns,” James decides, which pleases Ellie. She seems to derive a certain satisfaction at the idea of living amongst the proletariat. But the only proletarians here are the transient occupants of the hostel, a disparate collection of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, leavened with German, French and Dutch. Everyone smiles naively across the various language divides, exchanging mispronounced words of greeting but little else. Banality is the order of the day. “This town is so old,” one of the Americans exclaims. “And amazing. I mean, who’s heard of Luxembourg? And here it is—walls and towers and stuff, and real cute.”

  Ellie becomes a focus of attention and James feels angry at the loss of her, annoyed that she has enthusiastically embraced this kind of communal living, even laughing and agreeing with the American about the age and cuteness of the town. She flirts with an Australian youth who wants to know all about Paris, argues with another American—or is he Canadian?—who is insisting that de Gaulle is once again the savior of France. And he understands, with a sudden shock, that she might just as well decide to go off with someone else to somewhere else; that there is little keeping the two of them together. At least Lis had been bound to Fando by bonds of dependence.

  * * *

  That evening they eat an impoverished meal with a dozen others in the gloomy refectory. The talk is all the Vietnam War and the approaching American election and what a shit LBJ is but thank God he’s going and how two of the Americans are evading the draft. Afterwards someone produces a guitar. That was the curse of those days—someone always had a guitar and the ability to strum a few chords and all of a sudden it ain’t me babe and we’re no longer thinking twice about whether there’s any real talent because it’s all right. At eleven o’clock an argument breaks out with the warden over whether too much noise is being made, and the group breaks up. Ellie goes outside with the Australian. James follows.

  “A smoke,” she says, seeing accusation in his face. “That’s all.”

  The Australian grins. His name is Declan. “Hey,” he says, “I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.” He has blond hair and scorched skin. James can imagine him at a Pacific beach, surfing or wrestling sharks or something else requiring much muscle and little brain.

  “It’s just James,” Ellie tells him. She has her Gold Flake tin open and is rolling a cigarette with great concentration. “You’re not in his way.”

  “Aren’t you two together?”

  “That’s right, we aren’t together. Just friends.” She strikes a match, lights the cigarette and blows smoke away as though dismissing the very idea of friendship.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Hey, don’t get riled, mate.”

 
There is a moment when James considers staying and arguing, with Ellie, not with the Australian. But he knows it would be pointless. Ellie is best left alone when she is in this kind of mood, so he just turns away and goes off to the men’s dormitory to sleep on a top bunk and wonder what she is doing apart from flirting with the Australian and smoking her home-rolled ciggies.

  He drifts off into a disturbed sleep. Trains rattle overhead throughout the night. In the men’s dormitory, lying in racks like overgrown fruit, they groan and complain in their sleep. A couple—is the female voice Ellie’s? The sound is too indistinct to identify—argue for hours in the street outside the hostel. Morning leaks light through veils of gray cloud and James feels he hasn’t slept more than an hour or two.

  * * *

  “You look like death warmed up,” she remarks. She herself is bright with energy, her eyes glistening, her mouth, that could be so sullen, drawn into that summer morning of a smile. Is it the presence of the Australian in her life?

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Declan.”

  “Oh, him.” She grimaces. “As thick as a plank. He can’t understand why they don’t speak English here in Luxembourg.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Because they do on the radio.” She pauses. “He was, my dear, thinking of Radio Luxembourg.” She laughs and James laughs with her. That was the trick. Laughter. Whatever she finds in other men, she’ll find laughter with James. And laughter is a powerful weapon to wield in the tortured world of male–female relations.

  After breakfast they pack their rucksacks under the critical eyes of Declan and a couple of others. “Where are you off to?” Declan asks.