by Simon Mawer
“She liked you,” Lenka said.
They were outside, walking between the paneláky. There was a Sunday sense of lassitude about the place. Kids were kicking a football around on a worn scrap of grass, but that was the only real activity. A bench of four old men argued about something. No doubt their wives were at home washing dishes.
“I thought she was cleverer than that,” Sam said.
His car was parked round the corner, next to a Trabant and a row of chained bicycles. Someone had written Umyj mne, wash me, in the dust of the rear window. One of the kids, no doubt. They drove away, avoiding the footballers.
“Your mother is quite a force,” he said, but Lenka felt the need to apologize on her behalf. “She shouldn’t have talked like that,” she said. “She should keep private matters private.”
“She needed to talk,” Sam said. “She’s a brave woman.”
The girl was silent. He knew she was looking at him. Those eyes that were the most intense cerulean blue. He wondered what she was thinking, whether she was measuring him up for something. If so, what?
17
He took an afternoon off and they went swimming. They decided on a place out of the city, on the river where Sam had been with Steffie once or twice. He hadn’t told Lenka that bit. A place he knew, that was all he told her. She’d like it.
So they packed picnic things in his Mercedes and set off, and it wasn’t long before he spotted the car following. In the last few months this sort of thing had grown rarer, as though even the security services had been tainted by the infection of liberalization, but there it was, plain enough, an anonymous Škoda on his tail, like a faithful dog tagging after them, turning where they turned, slowing when they slowed, remaining all the time about one hundred meters behind. They made their way south of the city and after a while took a rough road that led amongst wooded hills close to the river’s edge where you could park the car easily enough. The Škoda didn’t appear. Perhaps it was waiting somewhere out of sight, knowing that there was no other way out.
He turned the engine off. Silence rushed into the enclosed world of the Mercedes. “How’s this?”
Lenka’s expansive smile, a gleam of naked gum. “It’s lovely.” He felt that torrent of desire and affection, a dangerous complex of emotion over which he had no control. He leant towards her and kissed her, tasting the cigarette she had been smoking and the coffee she had drunk earlier, as though kissing her was to snatch a small part of her quotidian life and make it his as well.
They got out of the car and took their things from the boot. Not far away was a settlement of those small wooden cabins that Czechs use as country retreats—chaty. They were like beach huts on the English coast: the same clapboard constructions in vivid primary colors, the same defiant sense of pride. But these didn’t have uniformity. They might be put together out of anything: offcuts from a timber yard, corrugated iron, tarpaper, panels from an ancient car, barrels from a brewery. An old man watched from his garden as they carried their picnic things down through the trees to the water’s edge. The air was hot and still. The water flowed over stones and around spits of gravel with Smetana’s scurrying rhythms. Things moved in the woods that bordered the space. Birds sang. An egret, sinuous and chalk white, stood in the water on the far side, keeping one cautious eye on the intruders.
Sam took up his camera and snapped some photos: Lenka tossing her hair, Lenka holding up a hand to keep the camera off her face, Lenka smiling, Lenka frowning. “I will swim,” she declared in that matter-of-fact tone she adopted when speaking English, as though everything were a statement of fact and the subjunctive never existed. “And no photos.” She shook loose her hair, pulled her dress over her head and dropped it at her feet. When he’d been here before, Stephanie had struggled beneath her towel and finally emerged in a modest one-piece bathing costume. Lenka was made of sterner stuff. As unconcerned as if she were in the bathroom at home, she tossed her brassiere aside, stepped out of her underpants and stood for a moment contemplating the river. There was something hieratic about her narrow, pale body, like a figure from Slavic myth, a rusalka. He’d seen the opera with Steffie the previous autumn at the National Theatre with Milada Šubrtová playing the title role of the water nymph who falls in love with a human. It’s the age-old problem of a demigod getting tied up with a mortal, and you know it’s never going to work, however eloquently Rusalka may appeal to the moon.
Sam took up the camera again, quietly, so as not to disturb his prey. If he thought of their escort, he didn’t really care. The dirty buggers could peer at her through the trees with binoculars if that pleased them. Play with themselves if they liked. He’d not mentioned their presence to Lenka because he didn’t want to spoil the day. The camera shutter gave its little secretive clap of satisfaction. Apparently indifferent either to the camera or to anyone else who might have been watching, Lenka the water nymph stepped forward onto the pebbles, then on into the flow. The camera snatched at successive images. The water rose from ankle to calf, to thigh, over her pale buttocks and up to her waist, as though she were being assumed back into her natural element. The egret stretched its legs and flew away. Sunlight glittered on the water all around. Finally Lenka launched herself into the stream, her hair floating free on the surface like weed.
“You aren’t coming in,” she called back. Was it a question or a statement of fact? He hid the camera away, stripped off hurriedly and joined her in the water, conscious of his own bony, angular masculinity that seemed only graceless and maladroit beside her loveliness. She laughed and splashed. White masses wobbled and shimmered beneath the surface. He felt cool flesh and rough hair and wet lips and suddenly, drifting in the current, they were doing, more or less, what they had done before only in the cloistered privacy of his bedroom—a bohemian act in the middle of rural Bohemia, surrounded by her woods and fields, enveloped by the waters of the Vltava. Rusalka.
“You are not ashamed, are you?” she asked when, quite suddenly, it was all over.
“Rather overwhelmed,” he admitted.
“Don’t worry, you will not drown.”
* * *
Later they toweled themselves dry and lay in the sun. A breeze had got up to bring some kind of cool to the day. They ate sandwiches and drank beer and talked, and when they’d finished eating she lit a cigarette, one of the American ones he had given her, blew smoke away into the warm air and asked about Štěpánka. She called her Štěpánka, not Steffie or Stephanie. Štěpánka, as though Lenka were subsuming her into the Slav world.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want to understand.” A knowing smile. “She is perhaps competition.”
He reached out and took the cigarette from her mouth. He could feel the dampness of her saliva on the tip as he put it to his lips. “She works for the foreign service. I told you that. Not a diplomat. A secretary. And she’s just gone back to England. Posted. Our relationship is on hold, do you understand? Paused. A cooling-off period.”
“Was it hot before?”
“Lukewarm.”
She didn’t know the word. He explained—tepid, between hot and cold—and she lighted on the Czech word with delight: “Vlašný! So is Štěpánka a beautiful, vlašnou English rose?”
“I suppose she is.”
“And are you going to get married?”
“We’ve talked about it.”
“Diplomatically?”
“Very diplomatically.”
She laughed at the possibility of Sam contemplating marriage to this lukewarm English rose. “That means you have made no decision. Diplomats never make decisions, do they? They always refer back to their masters.”
“But this time—”
“There is no master. And you cannot make up your mind. Of course she is not your first girl. There have been many others. So by now you should know.”
He laughed. She had a wonderful capacity for making him laugh. Whether this was intentional on her part he wasn’t sure.
<
br /> “So tell me about these other girls who have made you so without decision.”
“All of them?”
“Will it take too long? The first, then. Tell me about the first.”
So he told her. A brief outline of part of the story: a friend of his mother’s, older than he by some years. Ten, twelve years, maybe. A brief, chaotic affair that lost him his virginity and gave him, what? some kind of understanding of what devotion might be. Love? He wasn’t sure. “It was just before I went to university. She made a great impression on me.”
“And what happened to her?”
“We…lost touch. She went away. Abroad.” He shrugged off that part of his life that had meant so much at the time and was now consigned to the scrapheap of memory. “Now you tell me,” he said, as though it were a game. Confessions, a kind of Chinese whispers, the message being passed from one to another and mangled in the process. “Now it’s your turn.”
She took the cigarette back. “You remember what Zdeněk said that evening?”
“Zdeněk?”
“Jitka’s husband. The composer. He said that here no one can live very long and still believe in reality. It is true. You have to remember it. Perhaps now for the first time we are beginning to live reality. It is like waking up from a bad dream. Suddenly all those things that were impossible during the bad dream become possible. We can say what we like, go places that we want, we can even try to forget the bad dream. If the Russians come with their guns and their tanks, then we will go back to the bad dream again and reality will disappear, but for the moment…”
She paused, smoking, looking away across the river to the woods on the far side. Of course he wondered what she was thinking, but there was something inscrutable about her expression that made reading her difficult. After a while she seemed to make up her mind. “So, in the dream—the bad dream—there was a party official, aparátník, my mother knew. I think he had known my father. Anyway, he was my mother’s friend. The usual thing: she gave him what he wanted, he used his influence on our behalf. What do the Americans say? A deal. I used to go to play with friends when he came to call. ‘Good day, Comrade Rovnák. What a shame, I was just going out.’ That kind of thing. It was through him that we were allowed back to Prague.”
“Allowed back?”
“That is another part of the bad dream. After my father’s conviction we were not allowed to live in Prague. So we lived in Pardubice, and this aparátník, he found her a better job, back in the city. Cleaning an office rather than cleaning the streets. His office, in fact. And he got us the flat. Actually, I think she quite liked him. Of course he had a wife and children, but she was on her own and there he was, a man who would look after her a bit. Comforting, I guess.” She stubbed out the cigarette on a stone. “And then he turned his attention to me. I was fifteen. He waited, you see. Until I was old enough.”
“Fifteen?”
“That is the age here. But the thing was, I wanted him. I think…oh, I don’t know. Jealousy, perhaps. I was jealous of my mother. She had her man and I wanted him. The funny thing was, like my mother said about herself, he was a believer. He believed in socialismus, the path towards a communist heaven. Often he would tell me about his family, his wife and his two children, what a good socialist mother she was, how excellent the children were in the Pioneers. You must be like that, Lenička, he would say to me. You must be dutiful and loyal to the Party. This is when we were in bed, after we had fucked.”
Sam thought of the SIS man called Harold Saumarez, with his access to secret records, his collection of sins and deceptions and betrayals. “And what happened?”
She looked round at Sam with a little smile. “One day he told me that he was very bad, that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing, that he couldn’t betray his wife any longer and he would have to stop seeing me. I was heartbroken and he was heartbroken. I think someone had got to know. The StB, who knows? People are always watching and whispering. Anyway, he promised me that he loved me and that he would see that I could get a place at university—because otherwise, because of my father, as Lenka Vadinská, I was banned. And he did all that.” She gave a little laugh. “You see how good and bad can be mixed up together? Was he good or was he bad? I never managed to work it out, and it worried me until I decided that there is no good or bad, there is just what hurts people and what doesn’t hurt people. He didn’t hurt his wife because she didn’t know about me. He hurt me but only a little because I was young and could learn from my experience. And he didn’t really hurt my mother because she was happy enough to let me take over. And he got me into university.”
“Doesn’t that make him quite good?”
She made a face. “You see, you use that word. Good. It is very bourgeois. He didn’t hurt too much, that is what I think. You are always going to hurt a bit, someone. Maybe you will hurt Štěpánka, maybe she will hurt you. Just make it a little hurt if you can.”
“And what about me and you? Will we hurt each other?”
There was a silence, not the dreadful silence of the safe room at the heart of the embassy, which had the kind of artificial silence that seems to suck the hearing out of your ears, but instead one of those country silences that is never quiet, filled as it is with birdsong and bee sound and the scurrying of animals and water. “I don’t think I am easy to hurt,” she said.
* * *
Reluctantly they carried their things back to the car. Contrary to popular rumor, paradise is finite. The old man who had watched them arrive was no longer to be seen. The wooden huts were closed and locked. The slamming of the car boot seemed a hideous intrusion on the quiet of the afternoon. He started the engine and they drove further along the track, just to see where it led, that was the idea. And to try and shake off the mood of anonymous threat that had descended on the afternoon. But after a mile or so through birch woods the way forward was blocked by a military vehicle, an armored car of some kind, the color of mud, ugly as all such vehicles are.
Sam brought the car to a halt. “What the hell’s this?” He reached beneath his seat for the camera.
“What are you doing?” There was an edge in Lenka’s voice that he had not heard before. As though it were fractured and might fall to pieces at any moment.
“A photo, before anyone appears.”
“You are a spy!”
“Just my job. Any opportunity.” The vehicle sat there dumbly, like a prizefighter asleep. It was four-wheeled, with a boat-shaped hull and sloping superstructure capped with a machine gun. He propped the camera on the dashboard and snapped a frame, wound the film on and took another shot. Then another.
“What is it?”
“Czechoslovak army? Who knows? No markings.” He pushed the camera under his seat and began to edge the car forward.
It was at that moment that a soldier appeared from behind the vehicle. He wore khaki trousers and a striped sweatshirt of the kind that French fishermen wear in comic films. There were no distinguishing marks of any kind on his clothing, no rank badges, no insignia; and nothing comic. Sam wound down the window and leant out. “We want to go through.”
The man stood and watched, as though he hadn’t understood. Beyond the vehicle other soldiers could be seen. Some of them carried weapons. They’d been doing something in the shallows of the river. Just visible through the trees was an inflatable boat with an outboard engine.
Sam climbed out of the car.
“Stůj!” the soldier called. Halt!
Sam smiled uncomprehendingly, walking towards the soldier with his hands outspread and talking a mixture of Czech and English and ignoring Lenka calling out from inside the car, calling for him to come back. “We just want to go swimming, you see? Me and my friend. Plavání. Plavání.” He even made the gesture of the breaststroke, just to make things clearer.
There was panic in the soldier’s eyes. He called something over his shoulder. Sam could make out the words “Comrade Lieutenant.” And then he understood what he had really
heard—not the Czech Stůj! but the Russian stoy! Not the Czech soudruh but the Russian tovarich. An officer appeared from behind the armored car. He was wearing a shirt with rank badges that Sam recognized as Czech. His face was wooden, the face of authority, prepared, under any circumstances, to deny whatever was being requested. “You can’t come past,” he said in Czech. “Military zone.”
Sam the idiot looked blank. “Nemluvím Cesky,” he said. “Promiňte.” And then, in English, making sweeping gestures with his arms. “I’ve been here before, with my girlfriend. Swimming.”
The man frowned. “Anglicky?”
“Yes, Anglicky. Diplomat.” He pointed back to the car. “You see? Diplomatic plates. Diplomatická. CD.”
The lieutenant snapped his fingers beneath Sam’s nose. “Dokumenty.”
There was a suspicious examination of passport and diplomatic pass, as though all such things were forgeries. “Pojd’,” he said.
Sam glanced back to the car, at Lenka’s anxious face peering through the windscreen. He gave a little sign of confidence—a grin, a brief thumbs-up. Then he was following the officer round the back of the vehicle where a sweaty soldier was crouched over a radio transmitter and another man—small, malevolent—sat reading a typed report. He wore khaki uniform but, again, without distinguishing marks. His battledress was tightly buttoned despite the heat. There was a brief exchange of words between him and the lieutenant, of which Sam was the subject. His papers were examined once again, with similar disdain.
“You English?” the malevolent man asked, in English.
“Yes,” Sam said. He smiled benevolently. This he enjoyed. He felt the cast-iron protection that his diplomatic status gave him, spiced with a hint of risk, a shiver of apprehension. His only real worry was Lenka, sitting anxiously in the car, with no diplomatic insurance and only the flimsy protection of association with himself. But what he knew now made any risk—surely small enough—worthwhile. “I’m here with my girlfriend. We were going swimming. If you like you can ring the British embassy. Or the ministry of foreign affairs. They will confirm my accreditation.”
