Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  She laughs softly against his shoulder. What has happened? Metaphors pile up in his mind. A dam has burst. A wall has been breached. Something, some hard carapace has at least been cracked. He bends his head and buries his face in her hair.

  “Maybe we should go,” she says thoughtfully.

  “Go where?”

  “Go to hear her play. In Prague.”

  “For God’s sake, we’ve planned on Greece, haven’t we?” He imagines olive groves, parched hillsides, cool wine and hot nights. Not some godforsaken city in Eastern Europe. “We can’t change our ideas now.”

  He feels her shrug. “It was just a thought,” she says.

  20

  The next morning, after breakfast, there are fond farewells at the house. “You are like my children,” Frau Eckstein confesses in a moment of surprising sentimentality. She kisses James on both cheeks, hugs Ellie to her like a daughter. “You must keep yourselves safe,” she admonishes them, as though safety were a thing one could choose to have or not.

  Horst drives them the short way to the nearest main road. He is full of instructions and information, delivered in the manner of the academic, as though what he says is an enormous joke if only you can see through the solemn façade. Apparently Donaueschingen is not really the source of the Donau, the Danube, at all. Instead the geographical honor ought to lie with the town of Furtwangen, a full forty-eight kilometers further upstream. There a stream called the Breg rises and runs down into what the whole world recognizes as the Danube. So, is Furtwangen the true source of the river? And should the river be renamed the Breg, causing consternation and chaos amongst cartographers the world over? “This important matter has never been resolved,” he tells them as he drops them at a convenient lay-by. “Another curious thing is that here we are only about thirty kilometers from the Rhine. The Rhine going one way, the Danube going the other. Ships that pass in the night, isn’t that what you say?” He looks up at them from within the prison of his own car. “It is perhaps a metaphor for life. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Freunde. Perhaps in Prague.”

  “Perhaps,” says Ellie.

  “I am a bit envious,” he calls out, “of your freedom.”

  That paradox once again. The freedom and the restriction—they can go anywhere they wish, but unless a vehicle stops for them they can go almost nowhere at all. Thus the journey resumes—short lifts (a van, a car)—eastwards out of the Black Forest towards…where? All around them is a vast expanse of southern Germany. James has never seen such size, the forests and fields going on to the horizon, seemingly unmarred by towns or cities. And the immaculate nature of the land, the roadside verge manicured, the fences polished, the woods perfectly trimmed. How is all this possible? The places he knows—Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire—shrink in memory to small, scruffy domains, while this, the map tells him, is only a fragment of Germany, called, apparently, Baden-Württemberg, which name evokes memories of model soldiers in shakoes and bearskins, fighting for statelets—the Grand Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemberg—that no longer exist outside of the history books.

  A lift drops them at a junction where a signpost points right towards Konstanz, Lindau and Osterreich, or left towards Memmingen, Ulm and München. Ulm seems familiar. A treaty? A battle?

  Ellie unfolds the map. “So we go right,” James says. “To Austria.”

  What does Austria mean? The Alps. Vienna. The Waltz, the Blue Danube, which is this same river whose source, nothing more than a stream, is fought over by two neighboring towns. Ellie turns the map thoughtfully. “Or we change plans…”

  “Change plans?”

  She points, to München and beyond. “Why not go to Prague?”

  “What?”

  She smiles encouragingly. “Wouldn’t it be great? We’d see her perform. Frau Eckstein, I mean. And we’d see what it’s really like there.”

  “But we’ve planned—”

  “And the Ides. That’d be cool.” She is bright and excited, suddenly enthralled by her idea. “We’re free, for Christ’s sake. We don’t have to do anything. And this…it’d be a bit of history, the kind of thing we’ll regret not having done. Italy we can see anytime, or Greece. But Czechoslovakia is now!” She waves the map as though that might conjure lifts out of the air. “How far can it be? A few hours.”

  “It’s the other side of the bloody Iron Curtain.”

  “So what?”

  “Are you serious?”

  But of course she’s serious. Her eyes are alight with a brighter fire than James has ever managed to ignite. He looks around. To the south are distant hills, with the Alps beyond them, out of sight but not out of mind. He has never seen the Alps. The biggest mountains he has known are in the Lake District and North Wales. When you are that ignorant novelty becomes the norm.

  “Let’s toss for it,” he decides. “Heads we continue as planned. Tails—”

  “What’s tails?”

  He shows the coin. A Deutschmark. “The eagle.”

  “So, eagle we go to Prague.”

  “If they’ll let us in.”

  “If they don’t, we just carry on as before.” There is no further argument. Tossing a coin resolves everything. The coin sings in the air and falls at their feet. The eagle.

  21

  “What about a trip to Munich?” Sam asked her.

  Lenka’s eyes widened. “Munich?”

  How do you measure distance? Munich was a mere two hundred miles away, yet beyond imagining. It was just over the border yet it was beyond the Pale. He might as well have suggested visiting the far side of the moon.

  “I’ve got to deliver diplomatic bags to the consulate and there’ll be plenty of room in the car. I’ll have to take the security man along, but he’s a mate and he’ll turn a blind eye. All you need is your passport. You do have a passport, don’t you?”

  Her eyes glistened. Behaving as you please was a new experience, doing your own thing something that you needed to practice. But yes, she did have a passport, issued for a student conference in Budapest the previous year. The only time she had ever been out of the country. But she’d need an exit visa, which would take a few days and three hundred crowns. Something like that. She made a face.

  “You’re my guest,” Sam assured her, and felt a strange, erotic thrill at the idea of giving her the money.

  * * *

  They traveled in an embassy car, a large, sagging Humber Super Snipe designed to demonstrate the importance of British manufacturing in a world of Tatra and Škoda. The two of them sat in the back while Derrick, ex–police sergeant and head of security at the embassy, drove. “They’ll think we’re the ambassador and his wife,” Sam said.

  Lenka giggled. The trip had transformed into something like a school prank, vaguely illicit yet harmless enough. They sat close together in the back, their hands intertwined in her lap, below the sight line of the driver’s reflected eyes. Sam experienced a terrible intensity of sensation, focused on the touch of her thigh against his, the grasp of her strong fingers, the warmth of her body. He wanted to make love to her, there and then, on the hot leather of the backseat of the embassy car as it swayed and lurched round corners and over switchbacks through the Bohemian countryside towards Pilsen. And he even wondered whether it might be possible to do it without the sergeant, with his tired, suspicious eyes, ever noticing.

  Perhaps not.

  As always there was barely any traffic on the roads, and after Pilsen they entered a landscape almost empty of people, as though war was imminent and the inhabitants had been evacuated. Warnings were posted along the road.

  POZOR!

  HRANIČNÍ PASMO

  VSTUP JEN NA POVOLENI

  Warning! Border Zone. Authorized entry only.

  Sam felt Lenka tense beside him. But the embassy car drove blithely on into the no-man’s-land that cut a swathe right through the center of Europe. The first line of fencing appeared, running north and south away into the distance, over fields and through woods.
r />   ZAKÁZÁNE PASMO

  VSTUP ZAKÁZÁN

  Forbidden zone. Do not enter.

  But they entered with sublime indifference, confident in their diplomatic plates, their diplomatic immunity from all interference. Watchtowers appeared on either side, marching above double fencing that was twice as tall as a man. Ahead was the checkpoint itself, with striped barriers like barbers’ poles. A few vehicles had collected against the gates like detritus in a stream. The Humber came to a halt in the reserved lane. Lenka’s grip tightened.

  “They know we’re coming,” Sam assured her. “All diplomatic cars have to cross at this point. We inform them we’re crossing and more or less at what time. It’s all perfectly normal. They probably won’t even look at our papers.”

  But they did. One of the guards, a mere child, leant in at the window and took the driver’s passport and diplomatic pass and called something out to his colleague behind him. Sam could hear Lenka’s sharp intake of breath, feel the tension in her body. She held her breath and waited. Sam got out of the car. “Is there a problem? Do you want to see the bags?” The boot was opened and the guards peered in at canvas pouches with their diplomatic seals. Sam smiled, proffering documents. The senior guard refused the offer and told the younger one that he should have just waved them through. “No bother at all,” Sam assured him. He reached into the boot, picked up a carton of two hundred cigarettes and proffered it to them. Player’s Please. “Here, split it among your mates.”

  There were smiles all round now. Even laughter. One of them tried out his English. “Beatles, you like Beatles?”

  “Beatles are great,” Sam assured him. “But Rolling Stones are better.” More laughter. He got back into the car, then leaned out of the window as though struck by a thought. “Just so you know,” he told them, “we’ll be back tomorrow evening.” The guards grinned and nodded. Derrick slipped the car into gear and allowed it to run forward, down the slope towards the bottom of the valley.

  Lenka let her breath go. “Why,” she asked in a whisper, “must I be afraid of them?” And then a hint of panic came into her voice, like the fluttering of a warning flag in the wind: “I don’t have an exit stamp. They didn’t give me an exit stamp. If I don’t have an exit stamp they won’t let me back in.”

  “Of course they will. At the worst it’ll be another carton of cigarettes.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Of course it’s right.”

  They crossed the bridge and drove up to the border post on the West German side. The black two-headed eagle flew in the warm breeze. There were more uniforms, a cursory glance at the driver’s documents and a salute from one of the guards. An American soldier watched from afar, leaning on the steering wheel of his jeep, chewing gum. The Iron Curtain had been crossed.

  * * *

  A day and a night in Munich. Their hotel was decked out in wood paneling and wrought iron and enough Gemütlichkeit to satisfy a multitude of American tourists. After they had settled in, they wandered through the narrow streets of the Altstadt. Sam suggested visiting the Frauenkirche and the Neues Rathaus, but Lenka demurred. “We have,” she pointed out, “many grand buildings in Prague.” Instead she wanted to see the shops, where she marveled at the superabundance of goods on display. Sam followed her, trying to read her mood. It took him time to understand that the reason she looked but never considered buying was that she simply didn’t have the money. The few deutschmarks she had changed from Czechoslovak crowns were enough to buy little more than a few cups of coffee.

  “I’ll buy you a present,” he suggested. “A dress. Is that what you’d like?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But I want to.”

  She considered the matter as she considered many things, with a faint frown of concentration, as though she were facing some kind of political or moral dilemma. “All right,” she said eventually. “But only because you want to.”

  They decided on a department store on Marienplatz, a building from the 1930s that nestled, and nestles still, against the neo-Gothic absurdities of the Neues Rathaus. The interior was heady with perfume and lit by crystal chandeliers. It was as though they had wandered into a piece of elaborate and tasteless costume jewelry; amidst all the glitter Lenka seemed like an uncut diamond, plain of dress and manner but clearly more beautiful than any of the treasures on display. Beneath the obsequious eye of a shop assistant, she tried things on—skirts of varying shortness, dresses with differing necklines, trousers, trouser suits—finally settling on a halterneck dress printed in squares of primary color.

  Very Mondrian, the shop assistant told her, producing scarves, necklaces, handbags that involved further expenditure but would, she assured her hesitating client, bring the whole ensemble to some kind of perfection. “These things are very swinging London.” A thoughtful pause. “Although Madam is not English, I think.”

  “Madam is Czech,” Lenka said.

  There was a moment’s hesitation in the woman’s flow of superlatives. “Czech is very interesting,” she said.

  * * *

  Later they had lunch at a café and afterwards strolled in the English Garden. The afternoon seemed trance-like, suffused with sunshine and pollen and the strong scent of anticipation. The agonies and excitements of Prague were matters affecting other people on the far side of the world. “Can we stay here for ever?” Lenka asked. She knew the answer but at that moment all things seemed possible. One might forever stroll hand in hand over landscaped lawns and think only of the forthcoming evening and the intense and humid night to follow.

  * * *

  Next morning they shopped for those items that could accompany them as part of the diplomatic bag—deodorants, soap, all the things you couldn’t find on the other side. Stockings, silk underwear, an Hermès scarf. To Lenka it seemed both a subject of amusement—”That is the trouble with everyone in the West: they are obsessed with things”—and a source of bitterness—”Why is there so much, and yet we have so little? Didn’t Germany lose the war? and yet here they are, like victors.”

  After lunch Sam left her at the hotel and took their haul to the consulate to pack it away in the boot of the Humber, sealed in those canvas bags inscribed with HBM DIPLOMATIC SERVICE. There was the feeling of end of holiday, of bathos, of anticlimax. With Derrick driving, he went back to collect Lenka. Derrick got out to put their luggage in the boot while Sam held the door open for Lenka to get in. There was that maneuver of long legs, a glimpse of thigh that reminded him of saying goodbye to Steffie. That moment seemed ages ago, part of another world that he had inhabited. In just a handful of days this woman had strolled into his life with her particular mixture of innocence and recklessness and taken it over. He could hear the tut-tutting from senior diplomats, smell the scorched odor of disapproval among the office staff, see outrage and betrayal in Steffie’s face. He wondered whether he cared and decided that he didn’t because—this was the disturbing thing—beside Lenka they all paled into insignificance.

  Once settled back in the car, Derrick’s eyes glanced in the mirror at the two passengers in the back. “You owe me one, Sam,” he said.

  “Two. And a packet of crisps.”

  22

  It takes them two days. Two days, five arguments, one night in the tent somewhere in the environs of Regensburg. From Regensburg they follow the haphazard path of lifts through forested hills and open farmland. The size of the country dwarfs the two of them, reduces them to figures in a landscape, ants crossing the vastness of the place. By the afternoon of the second day a swathe of forest lies across their path as they plod through the empty heat. Occasionally a car goes by but no one stops. An American army jeep passes them traveling in the opposite direction, followed by a German military vehicle. A helicopter chutters in the sky away to the south. And there is something else in the air—a sense of threat, of fear, of moment, the kind of feeling you might have approaching the edge of a precipice. Iron Curtain. The phrase dominates their progress.
On their map it is marked in a forbidding red, a serpentine line without obvious rhyme or reason, marked Staatsgrenze. Staatsgrenze is, they discover after thumbing through a phrasebook purchased in Regensburg, State Border.

  What goes on beyond that line is as unknown as the blank spaces on a medieval map. Here be dragons. Ellie looks accusingly at the empty landscape ahead, the hills and woods, a winding valley with its occasional and indifferent farmhouses.

  “I suppose we just walk,” James says.

  “What’s the choice?”

  The choice, he almost adds, is to give up this fucking idiot idea and continue south as they originally intended, to Italy and the sunshine. But Ellie holds the ultimate card, the one that trumps every argument, the one she deployed with such devastating skill in the damp camp in Regensburg when they argued about it—you go to Italy if that’s what you want, but I’m going to Prague. By myself if necessary.

  The fact is, he doesn’t want to lose her. Fando is held in thrall by Lis.

  So they walk on towards the border with the stolid plod of soldiers tramping, while indifferent cars go past, a few in their direction, more the other way, westwards, away from whatever it is that lies ahead. A sign says Waidhaus, 3 Kilometer and warns Staatsgrenze. They walk again, and again no one stops. Waidhaus is a collection of dull, stolid houses around a central square with a blue and white striped maypole. Outside the town a sign commands

  US FORCES

  PERSONNEL

  HALT.

  1 KILOMETER TO

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  DO NOT PROCEED

  WITHOUT AUTHORITY

  But ironically it is the American army which comes to the rescue, a jeep that draws up alongside them. The driver leans on the steering wheel and regards them with amused curiosity. He’s chewing gum. His face has an open all-American smile, a farm boy used to vast fields and a huge sky. Perhaps at home here in Bavaria. He wears khaki fatigues with sergeant’s stripes and a shoulder flash showing a fleur-de-lys with the motto Toujours Pret.