Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  “Hardly a star,” Eric remarked. “Studied under Oistrakh? How many thousands?”

  A bell rang; people filed back into the auditorium. Madeleine touched Sam’s wrist. “Who is the lovely lady, Sam?”

  “A friend.”

  “The friend looks very attractive.”

  He feigned indifference. “And a couple of hitchhikers she’s taken under her wing. I think I’d better get back…”

  They filed back into their seats and settled. The orchestra was returning, followed by Egorkin himself, who now faced the audience with clenched hands held aloft in some kind of demonstration of solidarity. A Russian saluting the Czechs. The applause rose appreciatively, a tide of enthusiasm borne on their awareness of his reputation, his public protest over the trial in Moscow of the dissidents Daniel and Sinyavsky and the subsequent withdrawal of permission for him to travel to the West. They knew well enough where his sympathies lay.

  Further applause greeted the soloists, Birgit Eckstein leading the way as befitted the senior player, followed by the young violinist, bringing with her a small reputation, promising abilities and a condescending smile from Birgit Eckstein. Yet, as the pair acknowledged the applause, the young woman’s flame-red evening dress quite consumed Eckstein’s charcoal gray.

  There was that collective settling before the music began. And then the conductor raised his baton and launched the piece, the Brahms Double Concerto, a complex interplay of orchestra, violin and cello in which the young Pankova fenced with the more experienced cellist and matched passage for passage, thrust for thrust, always keeping her opponent at bay, all of this without either looking at the other, as though they were two swordsmen fighting blind. Except towards the end of the final movement when the women glanced at each other for a moment, and smiled.

  Applause. A tumult of applause. Catharsis.

  * * *

  Afterwards, in a pillared room with views over the river, there was a reception in honor of the musicians. The conductor was there with a small escort from the Soviet embassy to keep him company, while the Soviet ambassador himself, stout, bespectacled and grim, watched in disapproval. Beside him stood the minister for cultural affairs and the mayor of Prague, beaming on everyone as though they were to take the credit. Guests, journalists, photographers clustered round the soloists. Glasses of Moravian wine were raised in salute. Flashbulbs popped like bursts of summer lightning. Thankfully, Eric and Madeleine had gone, in the name of duty, to some diplomatic event or other on the other side of town.

  Sam led Lenka towards the Russian group. “I don’t want to speak with them,” Lenka protested, but Sam only laughed. “You can do what you please, but if diplomats applied that criterion we’d never talk to anybody.”

  Reluctantly the conductor’s guardians edged aside to let them through to the great man. There was a shaking of hands. Lenka was introduced. Surprise was expressed at Sam’s fluent Russian and at Egorkin’s near-fluent English. “But my friends here do not like it when I speak in English. They fear I am saying dangerous things.” He laughed, slipping back into Russian to the obvious relief of the escort. They discussed the performance, the emotional impact of the Dvořák, the technical difficulties of the Brahms. It was hard for a young violinist to perform the Double Concerto with a cellist of such standing as Frau Eckstein, but Nadezhda Nikolayevna had achieved it with brilliance, didn’t Mr. Wareham agree?

  Of course he did.

  “You must come to one of our recitals,” Egorkin said. “I will accompany Nadezhda Nikolayevna on the piano. We play in Brno, of course, and Ostrava, but also Marienbad. Perhaps you will make it to Marienbad? It would be good to have a sympathetic ear in the audience.” There was a sudden and surprising tone of pleading in his voice. “Please come. Perhaps there we can speak more freely. I will give you tickets so you cannot refuse.” He glanced round and summoned the violinist from where she was talking with a journalist. She came obediently, more like a secretary than a principal performer. “We will have tickets for Marienbad sent to this gentleman. Mr….?”

  “Wareham.”

  Further introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Pankova’s were small and slender but with a sharp grip. She wrote the name Wareham into a little notebook in careful Latin characters. “Mr. Wareham is at the British embassy,” Egorkin explained. He glanced at Lenka. “Two tickets, of course.”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure—”

  “You cannot be sure to come?” The Russian made an expression of exaggerated disappointment. “But you must come, Mr. Wareham. We will be playing the Kreutzer Sonata, which everyone knows, but particularly the Janáček, which no one knows but everyone should. Do you know it? It is very beautiful and deeply mysterious. Full of the soul of this wonderful country.” And then one of the Russian embassy people had stepped in with an approximation of a smile and the suggestion that Comrade Egorkin and Comrade Pankova had other commitments to meet and could not spend too much time talking to just two guests.

  “I would be most sad if you cannot make it,” Egorkin said, giving a jaunty salute as he and the violinist were encouraged away.

  30

  They wait while the diminutive gray figure of Birgit Eckstein sips mineral water and talks to someone from Czech Radio. James feels awkward and embarrassed but Ellie is determined. Jitka has managed to get them this far, into the room where Frau Eckstein sits and brings her mind back from Dvořák and Brahms to focus on the commonplace and the trivial. “We’ve come all this way in order to hear her,” Ellie insists. “We can’t just walk away.”

  When the interview is over Frau Eckstein looks round vaguely at the two of them, saying something in German. Even without knowing a word of the language, James can tell what she is saying. Who are these people? Are they students?

  “Hello, Frau Eckstein.”

  She doesn’t recognize them.

  “Frau Eckstein,” Ellie says. “It’s us. Eleanor and James. We stayed at your house a few days ago. We came to Prague, just as you said. To hear you play.”

  A vague smile, as though she is tolerant of things the young will do, absurd things like cross the Iron Curtain on a whim. Somehow James expected more—an explosion of surprise, an embrace, a motherly welcome. “I remember. Yes, I remember.”

  But perhaps she doesn’t even really remember them—just two hitchers picked up on the road and given a place to pitch their tent for the night. Nothing much. “The Bach,” he says, as though to give her something on which to fix her memory. “You played that for us. In your music room.”

  “Of course I did. That is always my encore piece.”

  Always my encore piece. Understanding dawns that, far from being spontaneous, an encore may be something practiced, anticipated, given out like sweets to adoring children.

  “Ellie and I thought you played wonderfully.”

  The woman shakes her head. She’s tired, bothered by all the fuss. “What do you know? I played poorly but only I know it.” A bitter laugh. “I play poorly and the people applaud just the same. What do they know? Dvořák himself disliked the cello as a solo instrument, do they know that? He said the instrument’s middle register is fine but the upper voice squeaks and the lower voice growls. Did you know that? That maybe should be a lesson for you—it is quite possible for an artist not to understand his own art.”

  She turns. There’s a photographer trying to get her to look his way. Flashes bounce around the room. She looks peeved. No she will not pose with her cello. The cello is for playing, not posing. “These people,” she says, with a tired and colluding smile towards Ellie and James, “they are vulgar and they know nothing.”

  VII

  31

  Meetings in the embassy safe room are daily. Rumors abound, throughout the city, over the airwaves, from one embassy to another. Leaders from various Iron Curtain countries drop in on Prague without notice. Troops are reported to be gathering in Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Ukraine. There are stories of late-night phone calls between Prague
and the Kremlin, between Brezhnev and Dubček.

  “The Czechoslovak leadership,” Eric Whittaker said yet again, “is walking a knife-edge.”

  Someone asked, “What’s our own position, Eric? If it should all go wrong, I mean. If the Soviets decide to move in. What the devil do we do?”

  Eric winced. “Heaven forfend. Of course we just keep our heads below the parapet. Strictly their own affair. Just like Hungary in fifty-six. We’ll get everyone into the embassy and batten down the hatches.”

  “And HMG?”

  “The official government position is that any such escalation would be a strictly internal matter for the countries concerned—in this case, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.”

  “It seems like another betrayal, doesn’t it?” Sam said. “Munich 1938 and now Prague 1968. Do you see the pattern? Nineteen eighteen the state is created. Nineteen thirty-eight it is betrayed by the Great Powers, 1948 the communists grab power. And now here we are in 1968. It looks ominous.”

  “I didn’t know you were a numerologist, Sam.”

  “Just a pessimist, Eric.”

  “Well, let’s have a bit of optimism. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.” Whittaker would have liked that lapidary sentence to be an end to the meeting, but someone—the head of consular services this time—was always there to ruin a good ending: “But are we preparing for the worst, Eric? What about the evacuation of British nationals in the event of an invasion? Since the place has become a magnet for every trendy socialist Tom, Dick and Harry we’ve got hundreds here. There’s even a bloody pop group due in a couple of days.” He glanced at a typed sheet in front of him. “Apparently they call themselves The Moody Blues, although, God knows, it’s me that’s moody. And blue.”

  * * *

  Sam fell in beside Whittaker as they left the safe room. “I’ve just received this from the Russian embassy.” He held out an envelope with his name written on it.

  Whittaker glanced inside with a look of surprise. “Lucky you. That’d be a hot ticket in London.”

  “They’re from Gennady Egorkin himself. He seemed very insistent that I go.”

  “So what’s keeping you? Are you taking the young lady we saw you with? Madeleine was most intrigued. Found it better entertainment than the Brahms. I could barely drag her away at the end.”

  “I hope she doesn’t go shooting her mouth off to Stephanie. Not before I’ve had a chance to tell her myself.”

  “Is it serious then?”

  “It’s all a bit sudden, really. Not quite what I expected.”

  “Well, be careful. Playing away from home is not easy in these parts.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “And I won’t breathe a word of it to Madeleine. Mind you, she already thinks you’re a two-timing bastard.”

  “It’s not that simple, Eric.”

  “My dear fellow, it never is. Speaks an expert.”

  32

  It’s no longer Marienbad, of course, any more than Karlsbad is still Karlsbad. Once again, those are the German names lurking in the collective memory behind the Czech. Now the world-famous spa towns are Mariánské Lázně and Karlovy Vary. Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad may be the more celebrated of the two, but there’s no doubt which is the more beautiful. Mariánské Lázně is a baroque jewel set in green velvet, a belle époque fantasy couched among wooded hills, a courtesan reclining in her bed. This is where Goethe came to take the waters and found his last and unrequited love, Ulrike von Levetzow; where the King-Emperor Edward VII failed to lose weight, chased tail and also encountered fellow emperor Franz-Josef I. Here Chopin stayed with his fiancée Maria Wodzińska, Winston Churchill spent part of his honeymoon with the lovely Clementine Hozier and Franz Kafka passed ten agonizing days with his fiancée Felice Bauer. Finally, this is where General George Patton, he of the ivory-handled revolvers and a tendency to slap combat-fatigued soldiers, turned up with the US Third Army in May 1945, a fact conveniently forgotten by the government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which acknowledged the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army alone.

  * * *

  The hotel Sam had chosen was in need of refurbishment, but beneath the faded paint and crumbling stucco you could see the elaborate wedding-cake decoration that had made the place so famous in its time. He parked the car in front of the main entrance. The Škoda that had followed them throughout the two-hour journey from Prague stopped fifty yards behind them, but he didn’t say anything about it to Lenka.

  The receptionist checked them in with as much grace as the desk sergeant at a police station. “Chopin suite,” he said, handing over a key that might have opened a prison cell. The lift was out of order. They carried their suitcases up the main stairs, out of the faded grandeur of the foyer into the drab functionalism of the upper floors where socialist ideals of uniformity and parsimony had long ago chased out any luxury that the nobility of Europe might have recognized. The door to the Chopin suite was marked with the composer’s name, framed by a treble clef and a selection of crochets and quavers. Within there was a sitting room with a plasterwork ceiling that gave only meager hints of what once might have been, and a bedroom with a fanciful portrait of the composer himself over the bed. Full-height windows overlooked the spa gardens.

  “Did you see?” Lenka asked as they unpacked. Already there was a kind of familiarity about their relationship, as though matters had been speeded up and domestication was the next step. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.

  “Did I see what?”

  “Of course you saw. The car that followed us, the same as before. The same as we saw when we went swimming. They follow you everywhere.”

  He watched as she hung her Munich dress in the wardrobe. “It’s always like that. You get used to it.”

  “I hate it. It is worse than we had before Dubček. At least we weren’t followed everywhere.”

  “But we were. Anyway, what does it matter as long as they haven’t booked into the room next door?”

  She looked round and ambushed him with that smile—a flash of white teeth, a glimpse of naked gum, a creasing of her eyes. “I don’t care what they hear,” she said.

  Later they strolled in the spa gardens. Classical pavilions were scattered amongst the lawns, hiding within them the fountains that spurted life-giving waters whose details were specified at each spring—urinary diseases, locomotory diseases, gastrointestinal problems, gynecological conditions, infertility, all were treatable. “If all this were true,” Sam remarked, “you wouldn’t need doctors.” He took photos, posing Lenka in the pavilion of the Karolina spring and snapping her as she walked through the arcade, alternately in shadow and out. One or two people paused to watch. At the Kolonáda a threadbare band played waltzes and polkas. On either side of the musicians the faces of Gennady Egorkin and Nadezdha Pankova stared out from posters as though expecting less levity, but Lenka ignored their disapproval, taking Sam’s hand and pirouetting with laughter while the musicians smiled and nodded. Sam took photographs of her spinning, her hair thrown out, her skirt billowing.

  * * *

  The recital that evening was held in a marbled hall decked out with neoclassical columns and naked goddesses. Just the two performers at the focus of the lights: Egorkin, dark and tense at the keyboard, and Nadezhda Pankova like a small, live flame (that crimson evening dress) beside him. As Egorkin had said, they’d chosen a demanding program, opening with the Kreutzer Sonata and, after the interval, moving into the Slav world with Prokofiev and Janáček. The Prokofiev, vivid and melodic, was straightforward enough, but it was in the strange rhythms and echoes of the Janáček violin sonata that the Russian duo found their true métier, piano and violin throwing Janáček’s musical motifs back and forth, sometimes like children at play, sometimes like warring creatures snarling at each other, sometimes like lovers caressing. Melodies initiated by the violin were cut to pieces by the staccato piano, and then the roles were reversed, a lilting piano theme chopped apart by buzzi
ng violin notes. At the end the whole piece reached a taut climax before drifting imperceptibly away into silence, like a person dying.

  There was a stillness in the auditorium, breathing suspended, hearts stopped. Then a blizzard of applause. As the storm engulfed them, the couple stood, holding hands aloft, bowing in careful unison. It was only then that Sam noticed something, a glance between the pair, shared smiles hastily suppressed, a second glance that lingered after the smiles had been extinguished. It was that in particular that convinced him, the held glance like a hand clasp that neither wanted to break. The maestro and his protégée were in love.

  Dutifully the two musicians settled down to play an encore—a quiet, melodic piece by Tchaikovsky—and while the second round of applause was filling the auditorium Sam and Lenka slipped out and found their way towards the back. At a gilded door, an attendant blocked the way in the impassive manner of a palace guard.

  There were a few moments of one-sided argument—only authorized personnel were allowed through—before Sam gave up and took one of his visiting cards from his wallet. He scribbled on the back: Brilliant! And then on an impulse added the name of the hotel where they were staying. “Can you see it gets to Maestro Egorkin?” he asked the attendant, adding a ten-crown note to help the thing on its way. “He invited us here and we want to show our appreciation. Do you understand?”

  Did he understand? He seemed far beyond understanding anything much, viewing the card with rank suspicion before opening the door behind him and speaking to someone inside. The card disappeared. So did the ten-crown note.

  “Thank you,” Sam said. “Thank you very much.” Beside him, Lenka swore softly.