by Simon Mawer
“Are you all right?” Jitka asks, kneeling down. “I saw you go. I don’t want you to be left out.”
“I’m all right.”
“With Ellie, everything isn’t good is it?”
He feigned indifference. “We’re friends. We get on well enough.”
“Not lovers?” Perhaps it’s the dark that makes it easier to ask direct questions like that.
“We were. Maybe not now.”
There’s a silence between them. The sounds all around—the shifting of leaves, the creep of nocturnal animals, the hoot of a tawny owl, the muttered talk from the other side of the wall—do nothing to erode this particular silence. Her shadow comes closer to his face until he can feel the warmth of her breath and then that same touch as in the Ides’ gig a few days ago, lips soft like mushrooms with the taste of her saliva now—beer, grilled sausage, slivovice. He puts up a hand, perhaps to hold her off because her husband is there, just the other side of the wall. Yet whatever he intends is not what happens because he finds only the loose edge of her T-shirt and her naked belly beneath, and then—her mouth on his, their tongues intertwining—her breasts hanging loose. He cups one, feels its ripe softness and the hard nub of her nipple, and for a moment they are like that, mouth on mouth, hand on breast. Then she pulls away and is gone, back to the other side of the ruined wall, back to the dying embers of the fire and her marriage to Zdeněk.
That moment of communion is something James will remember for the whole of his life, an instant of intimacy in the midst of a Bohemian forest transfigured into something almost eternal. As eternal as events can be in a human existence. He’ll remember it when other, not dissimilar moments are long forgotten, when Ellie is no more than a fond memory, when Jitka herself, entirely unbeknownst to him, has left Zdeněk, left her country, gone to America and found work as a teacher of violin and occasional orchestral player in New York, to be knocked down and killed by a car when crossing a street in Chicago in 1978.
That’s the way things work out. There’s no plan, no narrative thread. They just happen. You may as well roll a die.
37
Dawn light leaks into the ruins of the castle. Figures emerge from sleeping bags, yawning and stretching and pulling on clothes with scant regard for modesty. There’s the chill of early morning, the faint sensation of the evening before not having been worth the discomfort of the present. Someone kicks the embers of the fire to let them burn out. Others make their way down a precipitous path into the gorge below the castle, to the edge of the river where they wash approximately. The water is cold, as though it has come from high up and far away. Apparently indifferent to her audience, Lenka strips off completely and walks into the water until it’s up to her waist. The others watch, laughing and calling and daring her to go right in. On an impulse Ellie pulls off her own T-shirt and shorts and stumbles in to join her. For a moment they are close together, squealing and splashing, their two bodies a vivid contrast, the one tall and languid, the other small and quick. James watches with a peculiar, embarrassed focus, thinking how incongruous they seem in this wild place, and how far away from nature the human body has evolved to become pallid, almost hairless, awkward and vulnerable.
“Stop staring!” Ellie calls. There’s laughter.
Later the two bathers find a place apart to dry in the sun. James catches a glimpse of them through the trees, Ellie lying on her side with her hand on Lenka’s shoulder, then moving down out of sight, obscured by Ellie’s own body, Lenka laughing and lying back. And Ellie leaning forward.
He moves away hurriedly, fearful of being seen, fearful of the damage it might do.
38
They throw earth on the fire to extinguish it, look round their makeshift campsite for any scraps left behind, then shoulder their rucksacks and begin the return through the forest. Jitka walks with James; Zdeněk with his three friends; Ellie walks behind with Lenka. Ellie and Lenka are holding hands, which James notices as he turns to call something. He wants to hold Jitka’s hand. He wants some recognition of what happened in the dark the previous evening, a further moment of contact that can mean something to the two of them. It comes when she stumbles on a boulder and he grabs hold of her to keep her from falling, a squeeze of her hand that no one but she would ever notice, holding her up a moment longer than is necessary. “You saved my life,” she says, and laughs.
* * *
The train back to Prague is less crowded than the one that brought them. It’s the holiday month, so who wants to be going back to the city? They talk about their plans, or their lack of plans. “I guess we’ll be moving on next week,” James suggests, but Ellie disagrees. Sitting close to Lenka she looks at her with eyes that hint at something more than affection. Revelation, perhaps. She has been captivated by a constellation of things—the country, the spirit of place and Lenka herself. “Lenka thinks I could find work here. People want help with English now that so much is changing.”
Lenka shrugs. “It would not be legal. But for a few weeks…”
James remembers the two of them naked in the river, splashing and laughing, then lying on the bank to dry. He wonders about Lenka and about her boyfriend, the supercilious guy from the British embassy. What are her motives in all this? What does she do in the privacy of her own life? That evening, crushed into their bedroom in Jitka’s flat, he and Ellie talk about matters of the heart and the head, Ellie hovering on the edge of confession. “She’s so beautiful,” she says. “Don’t you think so?”
“You do.”
“And you don’t?”
“She’s all right.”
“But you prefer Jitka?”
There’s a silence in the darkness. “Why do you say that?”
She laughs softly. “Because of the way you look at her. Because of the way she went to find you when we were at that ruin. What did you two get up to?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
IX
39
Lenka returned from the weekend in the country burnished by the sun, stained with sweat, smelling of crushed grass and earth and wood smoke. He watched her undress, walking naked round their room, flaxen and honeyed and entirely lovely. Like some half-wild animal returned to him.
“A couple more days,” he said when she asked about Egorkin and Pankova, “that’s all. Just pretend they’re not there.”
“How can I pretend they’re not there? I can smell them.” Sam laughed. “I can smell you.“
She’d brought a newspaper from the station. The main pages were filled with reports on the political scene, the coming and going of various foreign leaders, debates in the Party Presidium, rumors of the Russian leadership applying pressure on Dubček, on President Svoboda, on Prime Minister Černík. The Čierna nad Tisou accord, the Bratislava Agreement, all these vows of good intention were dissected and analyzed. But on one of the inside pages, there was the story about the pair of missing Russian musicians. Various theories were voiced. Perhaps they had fled to Hungary with the intention of getting to Yugoslavia, or maybe they’d got across the border to Vienna.
Egorkin was delighted with the journalist’s stupidity, as though his hiding in Sam’s flat were all his own doing. Yet once the novelty wore off he went back to complaining as he had from the start. One of his first complaints was circumscribed by the very matter he complained about, so he had voiced his objections by holding Sam close and whispering in his ear, an angry whisper like the exhalation from a steam engine. “The room will be bugged. We cannot live here. The room, your whole damn apartment. There will be microphones.”
Despite Sam’s assurances to the contrary the Russian had carried out his own ridiculous search, hushing Sam and the girl to silence, while he went over the room inch by inch, passing his fingertips over the walls, lifting pictures, moving furniture, even examining the glass in the window panes. Finally he put the radio on and tuned it to Radio Moscow, turning the volume up and speaking more normally but still softly, as though he had a th
roat infection: “I wish to register my protest at not being held in the embassy building itself.”
The violinist appeared better adapted to their current circumstances than her man. She was happy to lie on the bed reading one of Sam’s Russian books, a copy of Chyotki, “Rosary,” Anna Akhmatova’s second collection of poems that he had found years ago in a sixpenny tray outside a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It was one of the original Giperborei editions, but more than that, it was penciled (he had struggled to contain his excitement as he had handed over his sixpence to the bookseller) with the poet’s monogram on the title page, the letter a struck through with a dash. A small but perfect treasure. This book, taken from a bookcase in the sitting room, created a small point of contact with Nadezhda. Her eyes came alive as she turned it over in her hands, touching it with her tough, violinist’s fingertips. It seemed that Akhmatova was some kind of idol for her, the poet’s death two years ago an event with almost religious significance. “We thought we were beggars,” she murmured, quoting. “We thought we had nothing at all.”
She was even more astonished to discover that Sam had actually met Akhmatova in Oxford when, after years of obscurity and persecution, the poet had finally been allowed to travel outside Russia to receive the plaudits of the West and an honorary degree.
The violinist’s eyes widened. “Tell me, what was she like?”
He hesitated. The truth was he had loved the legend that was Akhmatova, the woman of the early poems, the woman of the Nathan Altman portrait, all bony shoulders and languid legs and hidden treasures; the woman whose irregular lifestyle and courage in the face of Stalin’s oppression had elevated her to the heroic. But there, in that reception in Oxford three years ago, amidst the chatter and the jabber and the clink of glasses, he had found only the ruin of that ideal, a stout old dear who looked incongruous in academical robes, more like a school dinner lady than a great poet. “She was like an old warhorse,” he told the girl. “Unsteady on her feet and a bit bewildered by all the fuss, but bright-eyed and curious. It was the first time she’d been allowed to travel outside Russia in fifty years.”
“But you met her? Spoke with her?”
“Shook hands with her. Told her, rather inadequately, that I was a great admirer, that I had been reading her poems since I was eighteen and it was through them that I first felt the language. I felt a bit stupid, to be honest. What do you say to someone like that?”
“And what did she reply to you?”
Sam laughed. “She said, ‘How strange.’ “
“How strange,” Nadezhda repeated, as though this portentous phrase were a newly discovered work by Akhmatova herself. From that moment she looked at Sam with wonder, as though maybe, by proximity, some of the spirit of the poet had been transferred to him. Later, when he was leaving the room and he addressed her formally as Nadezhda Nikolayevna, she cast her eyes downwards and quietly invited him to please call her Nadia. It was a Chekhovian moment.
40
In his office Sam scanned the newspapers for any further hint of the news breaking. There were small items in a couple of the dailies—Concerts Canceled, Russian conductor rumored to be unwell, that kind of thing. But clearly no one had any idea of what had happened, that the whole world of Gennady Egorkin, conductor and pianist of international fame, and his violinist mistress had shrunk to this, the spare room in Sam Wareham’s flat where they lived in artificial light, like creatures in a vivarium.
“The wheels are in motion,” Eric Whittaker assured him. “But as you know they grind with almost glacial slowness at times.”
“What does H.E. think?”
“He’s not exactly over the moon, Sam. I’m afraid he thinks what all ambassadors think—don’t rock the boat if you don’t have to. And in this case, we didn’t have to. Except you did.”
That afternoon Nadia came quietly to the sitting room and presented him with a single sheet of paper taken from a notebook he had provided. Lenka was at the desk, revising the piece she was preparing for Literární listy. She stopped her typing and watched as Sam read. Nadia had written in pencil, a poem in the careful, concise, allusive style of early Akhmatova entitled “How Strange,” about a stranger who meets her in a foreign country and talks to her about the world from where he has come and to where she might go. Ambiguities informed the piece. Who was the poet—Nadezhda Nikolayevna Pankova or Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova? And where was the encounter—here in this flat in the Malá Strana, or in New College Oxford three years earlier when he had met the great Russian poet; or two decades earlier than that, when another English diplomat with the curiously un-English name of Isaiah Berlin had encountered, stumbling slightly over his Russian greeting, the great poet in her Leningrad apartment? And what exactly was the gulf of misunderstanding that separated the two protagonists?
Nadia blushed as Sam read it. “It’s just a small thing.” But it wasn’t a small thing at all. It was rather good. That’s what he told her. Rather good. She thought he was damning her poem with faint praise, whereas of course it was typical British understatement.
41
The inevitable call to the ambassador’s office was delivered by Eric Whittaker. “I’m afraid the Old Man wants to see you, Sam. He’s not in a good mood. Remember, whatever you do, don’t argue with him, do you understand? Don’t argue with him even if you are right.”
The Old Man. It was like a summons from the headmaster, but then so much of the Foreign Office was like that, like the British public school with its rewards and its punishments, its fearsome jealousies and absurd rituals, its guilt and its triumphs. The ambassador was sitting behind his desk, which was a bad sign. Just as you might expect in the headmaster’s study, on the wall behind him was a reproduction of that portrait of the Queen, the Annigoni portrait that depicts her as a young and desirable Renaissance monarch against a Tuscan landscape. Beneath this symbol of regal beauty the ambassador looked up from whatever he was pretending to work on and motioned Sam to sit down. That was another headmasterly trick, to keep the interviewee waiting while you completed the previous task.
“You’ve been a bit various recently, Sam,” he said finally, putting down his pen and looking up with a tight smile. It was an accusation dressed up as a pleasantry. Being various was not a good thing—constancy was what diplomacy demanded.
“Tell me about these refugees whom you’ve taken in from the street. What’s that all about, eh?” His expression was mild but the headmasterly threat lay beneath it.
“Gennady Egorkin, ambassador. And a protégée of his called Nadezhda Pankova.”
“So Eric told me. I’ve heard of him, of course. Quite a reputation. The question is, what the hell are they doing in your flat, almost as guests of HMG?”
“That’s not exactly the case, sir. Both Eric and I have made the unofficial nature of their presence very clear to them. They more or less threw themselves on my mercy on Friday evening. After the reception, as a matter of fact. They’d escaped from their hotel when their minders weren’t watching—I certainly don’t have to tell you how it is with the Russians. Egorkin probably saw this as his last chance of getting out.”
“With your connivance.”
“No connivance at all, ambassador. Absolutely none. But what else could I have done? Told them to throw themselves on the mercy of the Americans?”
The ambassador gave a little grunt. Maybe that was the moment when the tide turned, that small grunt at the mention of possible rivalry by the Americans. “I don’t want them brought into the embassy, is that clear? I’ve been on to the P.U.S. and he’s adamant. Hasn’t spoken to the minister yet, but I’m sure he’ll be in agreement too. We don’t want a word of this to get out. We haven’t seen them and we haven’t given them shelter. If so much as a whisper gets into the embassy, the news will be all over Prague in half a day. You know that as well as I do. Chervonenko will be issuing diplomatic protests left, right and center and we’ll be accused of kidnapping two of his citizens and trying to de
stabilize a fraternal socialist country. For all I know he’ll claim we’re trying to start World War Three. The waters of Prague are muddied enough at the moment—we don’t want even more shit stirred into them.” The word was shocking on the ambassador’s lips. He gave a wry smile. “And in the meantime, you and Eric had better work out how to get them out of the country without anyone knowing.”
“We’ll sort something out, sir.”
“I suppose Saumarez will be involved, won’t he? He usually is in this sort of thing.”
“He is the expert, sir.”
Another grunt, this one tinged with displeasure. Sam shifted in his chair but the ambassador clearly hadn’t finished. “And then there was that business at the reception.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Made a bit of a scene, didn’t she?”
“I suppose Miss Konečková did speak with First Secretary Dubček in rather frank terms. But the circumstances…”
“We’re all very tense at the moment, I know. Still, you’re a diplomat, aren’t you? And she’s, well, she’s a local, isn’t she? Not a good idea, really. You bring a local gal to a diplomatic bun fight and it causes all sorts of trouble. Believe me, it’s always better to play at home. Especially here behind the Curtain, you never know what you’re letting yourself in for. Or us, come to that.”
“I can assure you that I am most sensitive to security issues.”
“Of course you are, old chap. Of course you are. I wouldn’t think for one moment you’d—”
“And I’ve had Harold Saumarez check her out.”
