Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “Where y’all goin’ then?” he asks.

  “Why d’you want to know?” Ellie says. “Are you going to arrest us or something?”

  He laughs. “Thought you might need a ride somewhere, ma’am. I passed you a while back and you sure haven’t moved on a whole lot. ‘Course, I can always leave you at the roadside if that’s what you want.”

  She bridles. Is that the word? It conjures up horses and struggling riders and reins. The sound of whinnying in the air. Police horses in Grosvenor Square. She shouted Pigs! at the police and chanted Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! and tried, rather ineffectually, to get through the main doors of the American embassy—behind which, so the rumor went, armed marines stood ready to open fire on any intruders. “Why aren’t you in Vietnam?” she demands, her tone laden with sarcasm.

  “Because I was lucky.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “With the Second Armored Cavalry, supporting our German friends and allies. Look, lady, I can’t stay here all day talking with you. If you don’t want a ride then I’ll have to move on—”

  “We’re going to Prague,” James says.

  Amusement steps down the alphabet, as so often, to bemusement. “Is that right? Well, I’m sorry to say I can’t take you quite that far, but I’ll take you to the border if you like. No one else is gonna give you a ride around here.”

  Ellie looks inquiringly at James. As far as he is concerned there is no question to answer. They climb into the vehicle.

  “We’re not meant to carry civilians,” the sergeant explains as he shoves the jeep into gear, “but if I found you in the border zone I could log you as an AVI. That’s Avoidance of Incident.” There’s a radio in the back of the jeep. As he drives he reaches over for the handset and talks to someone in that peculiar, truncated language the military use: Echo Foxtrot found two Civs near the border and is escorting them to the checkpoint. A disembodied voice squawks back at him through the earphone. “Affirmative, Echo Foxtrot,” it says.

  The driver is called Chester. Chester B. Falk, Sergeant First Class. From Tennessee. “Along with Davy Crockett,” he says. “You folks been to Tennessee? No? That’s no surprise. No one ever has but everyone has heard of it, because of Davy Crockett. Ain’t that a thing? What about you folks? Where you from? England, I’m guessing.”

  “I’m from Sheffield,” James says.

  “Hey, we have a Sheffield in Alabama.”

  Ellie is in the back of the jeep, with the rucksacks. She didn’t deign to sit with the soldier in the front. “I daresay the English one was named after it,” she calls out.

  “I don’t think so,” the sergeant replies. “England’s a whole lot more historic than the US.”

  “I was being ironic.”

  He laughs. “We simple folk don’t do irony.” Which seems to James pretty ironic in itself. They pass a further sign warning of the approaching border. Sergeant Falk glances round at his passengers. “You wanna see?”

  “What?”

  “The border. The goddam Iron Curtain. ‘Cause I’m supposed to have picked you up there, so we had better make an alibi, hadn’t we?”

  The jeep decelerates and turns off the main road onto a farm track between fields of wheat. They bump over potholes, pass through a collection of farm buildings and come out onto the side of a shallow valley. A tractor is at work, dragging a plow through the heavy loam of the nearest field. As the machine turns at the end of the furrow, the driver catches sight of the stationary jeep and raises his hand in some kind of salute. Falk gives a jaunty wave in return.

  “That’s it, folks. The border between East and West.”

  “Where?”

  “Stream at the bottom of the valley.” A concrete road runs parallel with the stream on their side of the valley; the far side is forest, implacable ranks of black pines stretching away in both directions.

  “Is that all?”

  Sergeant Falk smiles. He’s done this before. Same view, same laconic remarks. “Pretty regular we get folks straying across the border. Step over the stream and you’re in the CSSR. Sometimes even our own patrols. But you can’t go far because it ain’t quite that simple.” He turns the jeep onto the concrete road and drives south to where there is a break in the trees on the far side, a gap about a hundred yards wide where you can see through the forest into the world beyond, into the East.

  “There’s also that.”

  Drawn across the far end of the break is the Curtain. More wire than iron, it cuts across the space about five hundred yards away, a barrier of fencing apparently as fragile and translucent as gauze. Beyond the fence is a watchtower, a spider creature supported on slender legs with the sky glinting on its several eyes. It might just have paused in its progress across the countryside in order to examine the jeep and its three passengers.

  The engine of the jeep ticks as it cools. The tractor groans in the background, arguing with the heavy loam, while birds sing, as they will whatever the geopolitical circumstances. Far away the helicopter flies higher than most birds. Sergeant Chester reaches below the dashboard of the jeep, takes up a pair of binoculars and hands them to James. “Have a look. The Reds usually build the fences about a mile back from the actual border, but just here it comes closer. Something to do with the lay of the land, I guess. So we bring visitors here to have a look-see.”

  James puts the binoculars to his eyes. The spider’s body leaps towards him as though he’s examining it under a microscope. The beast is peopled, two figures moving vaguely behind the windows, watching him watching them. He pans down the creature’s stick legs to the ground. In front of it there are two parallel lines of fencing, flattened together by foreshortening. He can pick out barbed wire coiled along the tops of both lines and guess at about fifty yards of cleared soil between the two. Beyond the watchtower is a parallel road to match the one that they are on.

  Wordlessly, he hands the binoculars to Ellie.

  “The question is,” Chester muses, “what’s it for? If it’s to keep us out then it sure ain’t gonna work. A Patton tank’d go through that like a tractor through a picket fence. They know that and we know that. So what’s it for?” He glances round at his audience as though looking for an answer. “Easy, really. It’s to keep their people in. If you’ll excuse ma French, lady, you’re looking into the biggest fucking prison camp the world has ever seen.”

  There’s a significant pause before Ellie summons an answer. “It’s not as simple as that. Look at what’s happening in Czechoslovakia at this very moment. There’s freedom. They’ve abandoned censorship. They’re allowing political meetings. And foreign travel.”

  The soldier looks doubtful. “When you’re in the military you see the world through military eyes, ma’am. All I see is the Russkis just waitin’ on the borders to pay a fraternal visit to their Czechoslovakian brothers.” He puts the jeep in gear and they move slowly along the track, away from the implacable gaze of the watchtower. “And when that happens, it’s game over.”

  They reach the main road. Falk waits for a tourist coach to pass and then pulls out and turns left to follow the coach towards the border. The road dips down towards the bottom of the valley, but just before the stream there’s the German customs post. It has the look of a railway station about it, with most of the trains delayed or canceled. There are barriers striped like barbers’ poles and German police standing around doing not very much. A concrete building flies the black, red and gold of the Federal Republic, while a signpost holds up a black eagle like a medieval shield on the end of a lance. In an adjacent car park are half a dozen cars and three lorries. Over to the right another building flies the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack as well as the German flag. Beyond the border post the road dips down to the bottom of the valley, crosses a narrow bridge, then climbs up through the trees and disappears into the East.

  “There we are,” the sergeant says. “I don’t go any further than here. Once you’re over the border Czechoslovak border control is
about one K further up the road. So they tell me.”

  James and Ellie climb out of the jeep. “You kids look after yourselves,” the sergeant says, “and give my regards to Mr. Dooby Check if you see him.” He turns the jeep round, waves jauntily to the German border guards and drives off.

  James and Ellie contemplate the possibilities. As they watch, a single car appears on the Czechoslovak side and crosses the bridge towards the West German barriers. A border guard examines the driver’s documents while his colleague walks round the car, inspecting it with scant respect.

  “A Škoda,” James says.

  “What’s a Škoda?”

  “The car is. How can you tell a Škoda from a Jehovah’s Witness?”

  “No idea, but you’re going to tell me.”

  “You can close the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.”

  Gratifyingly, she laughs. They watch the border guard complete his inspection and allow the car to clatter its way past them into the West. Then they sling their rucksacks onto their shoulders and walk down the slope to the barrier.

  The German border guard is indifferent, taking their passports with barely a glance at the owners, flicking through the documents like a cardsharp before handing them back as though they are tainted. “You are to Czechoslovakia going? They will not let you pass—you have no visas.”

  They haven’t thought of visas.

  “Don’t they issue them at the border?”

  “Who knows? At the moment anything is possible.” He points up the hill on the other side. “Seven hundred meters, Czechoslovak control. Stay on the road or…” He makes a gesture, a pistol firing.

  “This is stupid,” James protests to Ellie. “You heard. We need visas. We haven’t got them so we’ll not be able to get in. We should turn round. There’s no point.”

  “Of course there’s a point. We’ll blag our way in. A bit of a smile, a bit of bullshit. It’ll be all right.”

  The barrier—a barber’s pole, a jousting lance—rises for them and they walk down the slope towards the bridge, Ellie first, James half a pace behind. Notices are everywhere—warnings, exhortations, threats.

  STAATSGRENZE

  DAS ÜBERSCHREITEN DER GRENZE IST EINE

  GRENZVERLETZUNG

  Across the hollow boards of the bridge the language changes into one that means even less to them:

  POZOR!

  STÁTNÍ HRANICE

  PROBÍHAJÍ HRANIČNÍM

  VODNÍM TOKEM

  Ellie leafs through the pocket Czech dictionary they bought off someone at the campsite in Regensburg. Probíhají doesn’t feature. “Looks like prohibition of some kind.” Vodni tok is “stream.” Warning! she decides. State border. Forbidden to cross the stream. Which, despite James’s protests, is precisely what they have just done, and are now stumping up the slope beyond, into no-man’s-land, between ranks of silver birch that stand like sentinels forbidding trespass into the pine forest beyond. It’s a long walk in the afternoon sun. A few cars pass them going out, the passengers staring through the windows; more cars pass going in, Volkswagens, Borgwards, NSUs, loaded with camping equipment. The Czechoslovak border post approaches, shimmering out of the hot air from the tarmac. Signs shout at them.

  POZOR! POZOR!

  Border guards observe their approach to the barrier with indifference. There’s a queue of cars warming up the summer air. Rows of parked cars to one side. Coaches drawn up like ships at a quayside. People line up at a concrete building with small windows whose blurred glass panes have never been cleaned. From the open door of an office music emerges as though from the throat of a tin man, something vaguely Beatles, vaguely Beach Boys.

  One of the guards snaps his fingers. “Pas,” he demands.

  They hand over their passports. Ellie smiles. Smiles appear to be a newcomer to the border guard’s repertoire of expressions. He attempts one with scant success. He is no older than they, a pale youth with a prominent Adam’s apple and a scattering of acne pustules across his cheeks. He examines the documents with curiosity. “English,” he says.

  “English,” Ellie agrees. “Anglický.”

  “Beatles,” he says. “Liverpool.”

  But there’s a change in the music emerging from the transistor radio inside the office. No longer approximately Beatles, it is now plainly and excruciatingly “Puppet on a String.” In Czech. Ellie begins to sing along with the music, in English.

  The guard smiles. This is a real smile, displaying a graveyard of teeth. “Přenosilová,” he says. “Loutka.”

  “Sandie Shaw,” Ellie responds, guessing.

  A second guard joins in. “Foots. Naked foots.” And then adds something in Czech—a tripping, splintered sound like the snapping of bones—which makes his colleague laugh out loud. “No vísum,” the first guard points out, handing the passports back with something like a hint of regret. He gestures towards the customs house where already people are crowding.

  They join a queue. German is spoken all around. Someone tries to explain in English and they hear a story of displacement and desolation that they only half-understand. “Once we live here,” the man tells them. “Now we are as tourists coming.”

  They edge forward along the pathways of bureaucracy. Inside the building is the smell of old concrete and stale sweat, and perhaps, lurking in the background, a hint of urine. Glum men sit at desks and administer the stamps of acceptance and authenticity with a device like a miniature guillotine. The mechanism descends, and there, on the page marked “visas,” is a new imprimatur: ČESKOSLOVENSKÉ VÍSUM. A few endorsements, a flash of a pen, a date stamp against VSTUPNÍ and all is done. Money changes hands through a metal grille. For their traveler’s checks they receive bundles of used notes denominated in Czechoslovak koruny. Questions are waved away. They move on, through further passageways and out into the afternoon sunshine on the inside of the Iron Curtain.

  Border

  It is interesting to contemplate the border they have just crossed. A curtain of iron—well, chain-link fencing, barbed wire and free-fire zones—but at the same time a mere line on a map between forest and forest, between mountain and mountain, between farmland and farmland. Between states, yes, the old kingdom of Bavaria, once ruled by mad King Ludwig, and the Austrian Empire, but a border between German and German, created during wars of religion and wars of politics and power, and culminating in the final border to end all borders, drawn on a map at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris in the year of peace, 1919, when the state of Czechoslovakia, mainly an amalgam of Czechs and Slovaks (who almost shared a language but little else), was created out of bits and pieces of the Austria-Hungary Empire. But here, with brilliant historical irony, the border meandered down stream valleys and along watersheds and failed entirely to take into account the language on the ground, neatly separating German speaker from German speaker and thereby planting the seeds of the next war which would bring the whole of the continent, indeed much of the whole world, to its knees in the bloodiest and nastiest conflict of all time.

  Shortly after the end of that war, in the month of October 1945, in what President Beneš of the newly liberated Czechoslovakia called, with fantastic insensitivity, “the final solution to the German question,” the German speakers on the eastern side of the border (approximately two million of them) were systematically driven over this border to join their cousins on the western side. Thus, in the last sixty years of its effective life, the border became a linguistic barrier as well as a political one.

  In the autumn of 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the watchtowers were dismantled and the barbed-wire fences uprooted. Finally in December 2007 the Czech Republic signed the Schengen Agreement and the border entirely disappeared, one hopes forever. No barbed wire, no customs posts, nothing more than an almost forgotten line drawn on the map. More than that, the crossing point where James and Eleanor entered Czechoslovakia in 1968 was, by 1997, bypassed by a new motorway a mile to the south, so that road traffic no
w flows back and forth with only a ritual road sign to tell the driver that he has moved from one country to another. And yet…Czech and German biologists have discovered that the red deer that roam the Bohemian forest are still keeping to their respective sides of the border, Czech deer on the east, Bavarian deer on the west. These deer cannot have been alive during the period of the Iron Curtain, so it seems that they have been taught by their parents, perhaps their grandparents. Thus the last trace of the Cold War division lies only within the brains of Cervus elaphus, the red deer.

  23

  James and Ellie walk away from this border, into the world beyond. Emptiness strikes them. They see woods, and fields, some cultivated, some derelict, but no people. A scatter of abandoned houses. Little traffic except for the West German cars that have been queuing at the border and are now driving past, indifferent to the lonely plod of Fando and Lis towards an unknown Tar.

  Finally a tractor stops for them. The driver is dark, weather-beaten, more like a sailor than a farmer. “Rom,” he says, beating his chest. They have no means of communication with him but they presume that’s his name. Frowning, talking volubly, Rom takes them as far as a hamlet where there are more abandoned houses and a few modern concrete ones, where loudspeakers on telegraph poles play music to no one at all. The tractor goes off up a track running through the fields, leaving them on the tarmac road with nothing to do but walk. Along the roadside are fruit trees laden with fruit—cherries, plums, apples. They walk, eating ripe plums. It’s late afternoon and there’s the matter of where to spend the night. No hotels, no pubs, no campsites in this desolate corner of Europe. The space around them seems to grow larger, vast and empty. “Plenty of places to put the tent up,” James observes. “Only danger will be being eaten by bears.”