Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

“Oh, yeah.” A vague gesture, a grin. “Saw her with Elliot, man. Out back. The van.” He squeezes the girl and she emits a little shriek of delight, like a doll that cries out when tipped over.

  The van.

  James pushes through the door. Beyond there’s a courtyard where people stand in groups smoking, talking, drinking. Parked against the far wall is the van. The Ides of March, it says on the side panel. Childlike flowers—daisies, buttercups—are painted across the corrugations. There’s something of the cash box about the vehicle. Riveted panels, doors closed and sealed, the sum inside unknown.

  Ellie and Elliot. An assonance of names. James can imagine an assonance of bodies. Possibilities crowd in on him. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know. He wants to see and yet he doesn’t want to see. He crosses the courtyard and goes round the back of the van and peers in through the single rear window. Within are variegated shadows and a chaos of stuff—boxes, blankets, sleeping bags, clothes—in the midst of which an octopoid creature writhes, tentacles spread, in the throes of ecstasy or death.

  He looks away. If he looks away maybe nothing has happened. If he looks away, maybe everything will be as it was before. Behind him guitars clash and drums sound like thunder. Feedback screeches through the building and out into the night and a voice calls over the sound system, “Elliot? Hey, can you hear me? Where the fuck is Elliot?” The name booms out into the night. “Calling Elliot! Come in Elliot!”

  There’s noise inside the van, animal scrabbling. He waits, watching, until the side door of the van slides opens and Elliot emerges, all teeth and beard and seaweed hair, swearing and pulling at his trousers. He slides the door shut behind him and hurries across the courtyard. James runs forward and grabs him. “Who’s that in there?” he demands.

  Elliot stumbles, looks confused.

  “In the van. Who was in the van with you?”

  The man shakes his head, eyes clouded. “A chick, man, a chick. What the fuck’s it got to do with you?” He throws off James’s grasp and disappears into the building. All around people are pushing their way back into the venue while James stands there against the stream, wondering. Cowardice confronts him. To know or not to know. Ellie or not Ellie?

  Spin a fucking coin. Heads, you open the door. Tails, you walk away.

  He doesn’t even dare trust the decision to the coin. Instead, he goes back inside the Kaverna, where the audience are clapping and cheering expectantly and the Ides are onstage again, strapping on their guitars, John fiddling with his microphone—”How y’all doing, folks?”—and Archer hitting the cymbals, sending splinters of sound crashing around in the narrow space. Elliot is there, his fingers snaking across the strings of a Fender Stratocaster as they snake across James’s fevered imagination. John throws out his arms. “Beware, The Ides of March!” There’s cheering, even some screaming, and the band breaks into “Mr. Tambourine Man,” jingle-jangling its way through the specious phrases while James pushes amongst the crowd looking for Ellie, the Ellie that isn’t in the van, the Ellie who doesn’t pull her knickers down for stoned guitarists, the Ellie who, so her father warned him, has a mind that lives on fantasy. Jitka’s there but where is Ellie? “Take me on a trip,” the Ides sing, “upon your magic swirling ship” and Jitka lifts her arms and puts them round his neck. “Haven’t you found Ellie?” she mouths against the sound of the band.

  “No idea where she’s gone.”

  She casts her dancing spell his way and they move in some kind of harmony, for a moment pressed hard together. She is small and sharp and surely she wants to be kissed. There’s that mole on her upper lip. He leans towards her and for a moment their mouths touch before she pulls away laughing, tapping his lips with her agile, violinist’s forefinger. “Bad boy,” she mouths. He turns and sways, careless of what he does, indifferent to whether he is or might be a bad boy. And Ellie’s there in front of him, dancing with the pair of them, her eyes glazed, her hair a disordered cloud. Jitka laughs silently. James leans towards Ellie’s head and shouts against the noise. “Where have you been?”

  She mouths the words: “A walk. Fresh air.”

  He knows it’s not true, hopes it is. “I was looking for you.”

  “I had a smoke.” She pulls him closer so that her voice booms in his ear. Laughing and talking at the same time: “I’m stoned.”

  “Where did you get the stuff?”

  “You want some?”

  “No.”

  She moves her head in time with the music like some kind of automated doll. The music jangles on, replete with all the platitudes of the age—magic swirling ships and smoke rings of your mind and all that stuff—while the crowd sways and waves, for the moment quite indifferent to the threats that encircle them. Music, they feel, can overcome anything—the Vietnam War, the Warsaw Pact, all hate, all violence, all the grim realities of life.

  * * *

  After the gig comes the sad, postcoital let-down. People hanging around outside the venue, their ears still singing. Others drifting away into the night. There’s calling and fractured laughter. Equipment is being carried out of the side entrance into the group’s van. And on the footpath alongside the river James and Ellie have a seething row.

  “What the fuck were you doing?”

  “I was doing whatever I please.”

  “You were with him in the van.”

  “And if I was, what’s it got to do with you?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “You mean you have some kind of rights over my body?”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “Well, then.”

  It’s the kind of argument that goes nowhere, just turns round and round with only occasional forays into a dangerous world outside the circle. “So what do you want to do? Go off with him?”

  “He’s a hell of a lot more interesting than you.”

  They make their way back to the flat, walking through the ancient empty streets that might belong to any European city. Jitka went earlier—something about Zdeněk expecting her. She reminded him of the address and how to get there. “Half an hour to walk,” she said. “It’s easy. Or maybe you can find a taxi. But beware—they cheat foreigners.”

  Still arguing in a desultory fashion, James and Ellie walk back across the river, past the now shuttered café where they met Lenka, through streets he does not know to an address he can barely understand. There are few pedestrians around and less traffic. Shops shuttered, bars closed. At one point a police car slows down beside them and a pallid face looks them over before deciding that they are what they seem to be, just a couple walking home. No threat to the Socialist Republic, at least not for the moment. At first Ellie is acquiescent, but later, as the walking goes on, as they wander back and forth through streets already visited, she begins to complain. Complaint is a relief. He can tell her to shut up and not care whether she is offended or not. So, snapping at each other exactly as in the play, Fando and Lis walk on, unobstructed and unchallenged, turning past corners they maybe recognize, and buildings perhaps they’ve seen before, until James finally identifies the one they have been searching for and manages to open the street door with the key that Jitka gave him. Together, his arm round Ellie, they climb the stairs to reach the crouched landing on the fifth floor. As silently as he can he opens the door to the flat and they creep inside. But still they have to pass the tiny room where Jitka and her husband sleep, where a figure with Jitka’s dimensions emerges from the shadows, saying something in Czech. “It’s just us,” James whispers. “Sorry we’re late, we got lost.”

  There’s a murmured acknowledgment, some further whispering, a collision with a piece of unseen furniture and a suppressed oath from Ellie before they gain the sanctuary of the bedroom. He feels for the switch. The light, when it comes on, is the color of piss. Ellie is a ragged, morose figure standing resentfully at the foot of their bed. “Turn that fucking thing off.”

  He kills the light and plunges them back into a deeper darkness than befor
e. It’s easier in the darkness, easier to creep to the bathroom and back, easier to undress in total darkness not knowing what will happen when they come together in the bed, easier to slide beneath the sheet from opposite sides and lie on their backs in the dark.

  He wants to touch her but doesn’t dare. “Ellie?” he says softly.

  “What do you want?”

  “Were you with Elliot?”

  “Elliot’s a creep. Why the hell would you think that?”

  “Were you with him?”

  There’s a little breath of sarcastic laughter in the darkness. “You’re jealous.”

  He remembers her words, snapped at him impatiently: you’re jealous of what you already possess; envious of what someone else has. “Of course I’m jealous.”

  “That’s very bourgeois of you. But sweet.”

  “But were you? There was someone in the van with him.”

  “How do you know that? Were you spying? How pervy. What did you see?”

  “Never mind what I saw—”

  “Well you obviously do.”

  He thinks of her father, the barrister, cross-examining a witness to expose the truth. “I saw him with a woman, in the van. Fucking.”

  “And you think it might have been me?”

  “You weren’t around anywhere. Someone said you were in the van.”

  “Someone said,” she repeats, her tone laden with sarcasm. There is a silence. And then her voice in the darkness: “Anyway, if it was me, what would you do?”

  It’s a good question. What would he do? “I just need to know, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think need has anything to do with it. You want to know. You want to know what I do with my body.”

  “Don’t be daft.”

  “It’s ownership, isn’t it? You want to own my body, and the thought of my sharing it with other men—Elliot or whoever—makes you think you’ve been robbed of something that’s yours. But it’s my body, to do with what I like.”

  “You’re putting words into my mouth.”

  “I don’t think I am. I think you are a typical bourgeois male chauvinist.”

  And with that she turns away from him and goes to sleep. James lies beside her in the narrow bed. Still he doesn’t know. Was that her in the van with Elliot, or not?

  * * *

  In the morning she claims to remember little of the evening before. “What happened?” she asks, sitting up in bed, her hair in chaos, her face pale and drawn. As she looks round the cramped room she gives strange glimpses of her mother. “God, I feel awful. Did I behave badly?”

  “You weren’t at your most charming.”

  “You say that just to get your own back.” The sheet has slipped from her shoulders. Her small breasts look limp, like discarded balloons after the party. “The music was good. I remember the music.” A sudden, sideways glance. “Did I do things I have to apologize for?”

  “If you don’t remember them, I don’t think they count.”

  “How very Jesuitical of you. Did we…?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. I remember a long walk, going round and round in circles.” She slips out of bed and roots around amidst the mess for a T-shirt. “God, I feel awful.”

  Watching her, James feels intimacy alloyed with indifference. It’s how he imagines a marriage might be after many years, when love has died and familiarity has taken its place. While she goes to the bathroom he gets dressed and finds Jitka in the tiny kitchen making coffee. Her husband has gone out early. Something to do with his work. She looks at James with quiet, thoughtful eyes. “Did you have a good time last evening?”

  He smiles at her and wonders, thinking of how he danced with her, pressed up hard against her for a moment, touching his lips on hers.

  “It was fun. The music was good, wasn’t it?”

  She laughs. “The music was bad. But it was still fun.” She pushes past him in the narrow space, resting her hand on his waist for a fraction of a second longer than one might expect.

  28

  That evening there is the Birgit Eckstein concert, in a nineteenth-century auditorium named after a prince of an empire that no longer exists. The orchestra—the sharp figure of Jitka is there in the first violins—is flanked by gilded columns and backed by the façade of a Greek temple. Overhead is a ceiling of plasterwork in blue and gold, while all around are fluted pillars and pilasters. Into the focus of this comes first the conductor, the Russian Gennady Egorkin, a sharp, anxious man with a receding hairline that makes him look older than he is. He stands on his little podium and faces the applause with something like apprehension. Then the fragile figure of Birgit Eckstein appears in the wings, looking a little like a cleaning lady who has just found a cello lying round the place, picked it up and wandered onto the stage to find the owner. But she is the owner, and Egorkin holds her hand aloft to display the fact while she gazes round with faint bemusement at the audience. The applause engulfs the pair of them. It echoes from the nymphs and satyrs, thunders on the boards, resonates in the instruments. As it slowly dies away Frau Eckstein takes her seat, hitches up her skirts and pulls the cello to her. Her Guadagnini, an Italian gigolo clutched between her legs.

  There follows an intense silence. One thousand people anticipating the moment. Egorkin bows faintly towards Eckstein, then turns to the orchestra. Maybe everything is to his satisfaction. If so, he raises his baton to start, like an artist putting his brush to canvas, and with quiet care paints the first notes—solemn, pensive strokes, a theme played back and forth between woodwind and strings while Birgit Eckstein sits immobile on her plinth, as though cast in pewter. It is only when the orchestra seems about to reach some kind of conclusion that suddenly, almost unexpectedly, she moves to strike her cello. That act brings about a kind of miracle, something strangely organic, a fusion between the sensuous curves of the instrument and the sharp angles of Birgit Eckstein’s small frame, the two contrasting shapes becoming one sonorous body resonating throughout the auditorium, crying out in tones that are almost human. Is it a lament for something innocent that is lost forever? James tries to cling to the notes as they circle round him, but they are ephemeral, evanescent, each following the other and all dying away before he can work out what to do with them. It is the totality that matters, not the fragments; the whole complex wave equation, not the individual terms. And as he listens, emotion creeps up on him without his being aware of it, like a thief in the night coshing him from behind. His nose stings and his eyes smart. Frau Eckstein’s small figure clutches at the body of the cello, grips its torso between her legs, sways with it, senses—you can tell, from the body of the auditorium you can tell—the vibrations of it with her thighs and her belly as she draws her bow across the strings as though fingering the flesh of a lover. He had never imagined that anything to do with classical music could be so blatantly sexual. And he senses Ellie beside him feeling the same thing. What she cannot experience with sex she can capture here—possession, surrender, the absorption of self into something greater than the individual. Perhaps she knows it. She grips his hand with tight talons while the crescendos, the climaxes, the agonizing slides into the depths, the slow, meditative passages work their way through the hall and into the thousand listening minds.

  * * *

  After the performance there is applause and bowing and a bouquet of flowers. While the orchestra stands, the indomitable soloist leaves for the wings before being called back to further plaudits, a strange ritual that takes on some of the qualities of a dance, the conductor holding high her hand as though leading her in a gavotte, Birgit Eckstein carrying her cello with the other, the orchestra players making their own little gestures of applause, the whole thing choreographed by obscure tradition. People call for an encore and on her third re-entry Frau Eckstein offers a faint smile and steps back onto the podium. There is immediate silence. She sits, composes herself for a moment, then lifts her bow, and from the first chord James knows, with the sudden thrill of arcane kn
owledge, what it will be—the Prelude from Bach’s C-minor cello suite. When the piece comes to the end amidst the storm of more applause, he is in tears.

  A novel experience, that, to be moved to tears by the abstract sounds of music. In fact, a first for James. Something to do with the instrument itself, so close to the human voice in tone and timbre, but also something to do with the shock of familiarity, that he knew the player and also that he knew what she was going to play as an encore and recognized it as soon as she struck the first note.

  29

  After the Dvořák came the interval. All the usual milling around, people not knowing exactly what to say about what they had just heard and what was to come. Sam wondered whether to try and find a drink, but Eric Whittaker was somewhere in the auditorium, and Madeleine with him. And Lenka had brought along those bloody hitchhikers she seemed to have adopted, which made things that bit more awkward. The girl was fine but the boy had seemed out of place in a concert hall. He had even started to applaud after the first movement of the Dvořak until the girl—Ellie, wasn’t it?—hushed him to silence.

  “So why the hell don’t people clap when it’s so good?” he was demanding as they stood around in the aisle, stretching their legs.

  “Because they don’t,” the girl retorted.

  Sam noticed the Whittakers and couldn’t avoid catching Madeleine’s eye. He excused himself and made his way to the back of the auditorium where there was a fraught conversation in which Eric extolled the virtues of the Elgar Cello Concerto above the Dvořák while Madeleine strained to see who Sam had brought with him.

  “What’s next?” Eric asked, trying to read the program. “The Brahms Double Concerto, is it?”

  Sam translated for him. “A Russian violinist called Nadezhda Pankova. Can’t say I’ve heard of her. Apparently studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Igor Oistrakh. Second place in the 1966 Wieniawski Competition in Poznan and third place in the International Tchaikovsky Competition, 1965.”