Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

  It was getting dark by the time he drew up at the gates of Ústřední Vojenská Nemocnice, the CENTRAL MILITARY HOSPITAL.

  Arc lights had been turned on, casting pools of chalky light in the dusk. There was a guardhouse, barriers striped like barbers’ poles, flags flying, all the paraphernalia that he remembered from his national service. A young soldier flagged him down at the barrier. Sam explained the nature of his visit. He was looking for a patient, a civilian patient transferred from a public hospital sometime this morning. An emergency. He gave the name, showed his diplomatic pass, waited while matters were pondered and phone calls made. Almost he shouted. Almost he screamed, I crossed the bloody Iron Curtain twice today! I went across to Germany and then back into your damned country and here I am, being held up outside a fucking hospital! Almost he shouted these things, but he didn’t. He sat there in front of the barrier, tapping his finger softly on the steering wheel, waiting.

  The soldier came back, puzzled. “This person is British?” he asked.

  “No, she is not British. You can tell from her name. Lenka Konečková. I have just explained that. She is Czech, like yourself.”

  “I am Slovak.”

  For a moment Sam closed his eyes and saw a world in which there was no stupidity. “I’m sorry. Like you, she is Czechoslovak,” he said, with careful emphasis.

  “So if she is Czechoslovak, why do you want to see her?”

  Because I am in love with her, he thought. Because I am desperate to see her get well. Because I am frightened of what the future might hold for her and for me. “Because she is a friend. I am a British diplomat and she is a friend.”

  “Does she perhaps work for the British embassy?” the youth asked, as though that might explain everything.

  Sam clutched at that particular straw. “Yes,” he said, “she works at the British embassy.”

  The soldier seemed to relax. “Then you may visit. You will park over there”—he pointed ahead where cars were drawn up in military ranks—”and you will go with an escort.”

  * * *

  Military it might be, but the sensations were the same as the civilian hospital—the same long, uniform corridors, the same harsh lighting, the same smells and sounds. Eventually the escort brought him to the department of neurosurgery, where no one else waited under the plain, unshaded bulbs of čekárna, the waiting room. There were a dozen metal-framed chairs with plastic seats and backs. A framed photograph adorned the walls, a portrait of the president, white-haired and smiling and looking as though Spencer Tracy had auditioned successfully for the part. Two ashtrays on aluminium stands underpinned the room with the smell of stale cigarette smoke. The escort left. Taking the cue from the ashtrays, Sam lit a cigarette and waited. A nurse glanced in on him but disappeared before he had time to speak. Was he even in the right place? Somewhere a phone rang but no one answered and the ringing went on and on. He got up, went to the door and looked down empty corridors. Nothing. There was the feeling that he was actually in the final, never completed, never even started Kafka novel—Das Krankenhaus, The Hospital.

  Samuel W. awoke one day to find himself in a deserted hospital…

  Finally a footfall sounded in the corridor and he looked up to find a doctor standing at the door. His white coat bore military tabs on the collar. A major. “I understand you are asking after a patient.”

  Sam stubbed out his cigarette. “That’s right. I was told she’d been transferred here.”

  “And your name is?”

  “Samuel Wareham. I’m at the British embassy.”

  The major nodded. “Come with me, please.”

  They went up a floor and along further corridors. Doors bore nameplates with titles and ranks—generálmajor prof. MUDr; plk. prof. MUDr—and then there was yet another waiting room, only this one had a photograph of the president shaking hands warmly with Marshal Zhukov. Glass doors led to a balcony but it was dark outside and the windows did little more than mirror the room itself and the two people waiting there. Lenka’s mother was one, standing in the center of the room like a ruined reflection of her daughter. Beside her, with his arm protectively round her waist, was the same man Sam and Lenka had encountered at the hotel in Mariánské Lázně, the man who had once been her mother’s lover and then, in a perverse succession, had become Lenka’s own. Pavel Rovnák.

  “Paní Konečková,” Sam said. “I’m so sorry we have to meet again like this.”

  The woman nodded, as though he was confirming something she had long expected, as if all this was the conclusion to some explanation she had been attempting in their previous encounter in her tiny, stained flat. This is what happens. This is what belief does.

  Sam turned to the man. “Pane Rovnák.” The two men shook hands. No surprise registered in the mother’s face that he and Rovnák already knew one another, so he assumed he had already been discussed, his presence here mulled over, explained, considered. “What’s happening?” he asked. “I was told—”

  “She’s in the operating theater,” Rovnák said. “In the best possible hands.”

  “I saw her at the other hospital. Why was she transferred? Why a military hospital?”

  “It’s the best we have.”

  “Pavel arranged it,” the woman said, as though that explained everything.

  “And she’s being operated on now, you say?”

  “That’s right.” He glanced at his watch. “Over two hours now.”

  There was a strange abstraction about the scene, that they were here in this soulless room and Lenka was somewhere near, unknowing, lying prone beneath glaring lights with surgeons stooped over her like priests at a mummification.

  “What do the surgeons say?”

  Rovnák didn’t answer immediately, but solicitously sat Lenka’s mother down in one of the chairs; then he took Sam’s arm to lead him away through the glass door onto the balcony. There was something paternal about the man’s behavior, as though it was his daughter rather than his former lover who now lay beneath the surgeon’s scalpel. He lit a cigarette, offered one to Sam. They stood side by side in the cool evening air, smoking and looking out over the hospital complex. There were people moving along the dimly lit paths between the buildings, nurses and orderlies as white as ghosts. Sirens sounded in the distance. Ambulances drove in, blue lights flashing. Perhaps something had occurred in the city, some incident between the occupation forces and civilians. Presumably injured Russian soldiers would be brought here for treatment.

  Rovnák spoke. His voice was level and emotionless, as though he were talking about the weather. “The chances are about even, that’s what I was told.”

  “The toss of a coin?”

  “If you want to put it like that. Even if they are successful, she may have suffered brain damage. When they spoke to Kateřina they appeared more optimistic and less precise. They talked of modern techniques, how so much can be done.” He pondered the matter of modern techniques as though he didn’t believe it either. The burning end of his cigarette glared like an angry eye. “I love her, you know that? Whatever she may have told you.”

  Strangely, Sam found that he rather liked the man. There was something matter-of-fact about him, something honest. “I can understand that. I love her too. And I’m sure she’ll come through.”

  “How can you be sure? As you said, the spin of a coin.”

  “It’ll come up heads.” He wondered whether his confidence in the ability of these unknown military surgeons was entirely misplaced. “How did you get her admitted here?” he asked. “I though it was reserved for the military.”

  “And the Party.”

  “But Lenka’s not a member of the Party. And neither is her mother.”

  Rovnák smiled wryly. “But I am. And I’ve always looked after them.” He said no more, just smoked and looked at what passed as a view. Finally he asked, “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Lenka?”

  “Of course Lenka. Who else?”

  “On
ly what I’ve heard from her friends. She was at the radio station yesterday morning, when they were barricading the place against the Russians troops. A stray bullet or something.”

  The man turned towards Sam. His voice rose out of its flat calm. “You could have stopped her.”

  “I could have stopped her? What do you mean by that?”

  Quite unexpectedly, absurdly really, there was anger in the man’s face. “She’d dropped those foolish friends of hers and moved in with you, hadn’t she? You’d turned her head. Trips to Mariánské Lázně. Even to Munich. You had her that close and yet you let her go.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Rovnák looked away again, as though something in the darkness had attracted him. When he spoke again it was tangential to Sam’s question. “She phoned me yesterday morning from your house. Wanted to know what was happening. I told her to keep away, but it’s not easy to persuade someone on the end of the phone. But you could have stopped her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s an adult—she can decide what to do and what not to do. And she was determined to go into the city to see what was happening.”

  The man drew on his cigarette. Sam watched his fingers, the same fingers that had known Lenka. How had they been? Probing, insistent, shameless. Rovnák shook his head. “She had no business to be there in the Old Town.”

  “She had no business there? For Christ’s sake—what about the fucking Russians?”

  He went back inside after that and sat next to Lenka’s mother, while Rovnák stayed out on the balcony. They waited. The woman smoked. Her breathing was harsh, as though she had obstructions deep inside her chest. Time moved with glacial slowness. Noises beyond the room seemed to come from another world where people did things—calling, talking, hurrying along corridors, pushing trolleys—yet in the waiting room time appeared suspended. This gave each trivial movement an enlarged significance, as though it was observed through a magnifying lens. Such as when Sam reached across and took hold of Kateřina’s hand and she grasped his in return. The faint smile she gave him. Her skin was tough and dry; her finger joints swollen by arthritis. She swallowed, moving her lips as though contemplating speech. She said nothing.

  * * *

  How many minutes passed before steps sounded in the corridor outside? Ten? Twenty? But then there was a footfall outside and a man appeared in the doorway. He was robed in white like a priest and wore a white surgical cap. A cotton mask was pulled down below his chin. Kateřina got to her feet. Rovnák came in from the balcony. The man looked at them with an expression that was curiously neutral, as though he had done this many times before and had become indifferent to the task, whether it was good news or bad.

  “Paní Konečková?”

  Sam stood up, watching the slow interplay of people—the man in white, the woman with the broad hips and brassy hair, the man with the mustache who had just come in from the balcony with a lit cigarette in his hand. Time seemed dilated by the gravitational fields of events around him, stretched out on a rack and close to breaking point, close to confessing all its secrets. One day, he thought, all this will be past. It will be consigned to memory, twisted into different shapes, given that patina of age that will hide most of the pain. Perhaps it will be taken out once in a while and wiped free of the dust of forgetting, so that for a few minutes it may shine bright again; but it will be past, whatever happens.

  52

  They’ve walked away from the border as far as the village. There was so much going on at the border—military, radio and TV crews, journalists all milling around like flies at an open wound—that no lifts were forthcoming. So they walked, and now they’ve found a Gasthof on the edge of the village—Gasthof zur Grenze, with Biergarten and Gaststätte, whatever that is, and rooms, a dozen of them, tucked under the eaves. The place is full of that slightly dodgy Bavarian coziness, manifested in wood carving and wrought ironwork and paintings of lads and lasses dancing round the maypole, that they even have a word for: Gemütlichkeit. Ellie might not be able to speak German but she produces that word from somewhere. Enveloped by this Gemütlichkeit, they’ve been served beer and plates of pork and sauerkraut by a middle-aged woman in a dirndl. Enriched as they are by the Wareham bloke’s contribution to their funds, they can afford it all. James’s head has almost stopped singing and his hearing is less muffled, but still there’s a sensation of unreality about the last ten days, as though everything happened to other people, Fando and Lis, perhaps. They discuss it all in the abstract—Jitka, Lenka, Zdeněk, even the embassy guy, Samuel Wareham—as if somehow the people no longer exist in the round but have faded into two dimensions, identified only by what they might have said or done. And in this bucolic beer garden, in the slanting August evening sunlight, the whole vision of Russian troops in their helmets, their uniforms, their massive tanks, seems something of a fantasy.

  “I just hope Lenka is all right,” Ellie says.

  “She will be.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  What makes him so sure is that he is too young to have witnessed much in the way of death. A couple of ancient grandparents, neither of whom he saw very often; that’s about it. His beer finishes and is replaced by another. “You fancied her, didn’t you?” he says.

  The conversation trips. Ellie’s expression changes. She’s suddenly caught between emotions, embarrassment and excitement in clumsy juxtaposition, battling for command of her expression.

  James sips his beer through the foam. “I saw you after the swim. You went off to dry and I saw you touch her.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I saw you, that’s all. You touched her shoulder and then her tits and she laughed. And then you kissed her. On the lips.”

  “You dirty pervert. Peeping Tom!”

  He laughs at her embarrassment. “You did, though.”

  Ellie says nothing for a while, but she’s still thinking about it. “I’ve never touched a woman like that before,” she says eventually. “Never really wanted to. But she…” She gives a small, humorless laugh. “Do you think I’m a lesbian, Jamie?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does if I’m going to start wearing tweeds and a collar and tie and cutting my hair short.”

  “And smoking a pipe.”

  “And wearing brogues and talking in a gruff voice and calling myself Elmer or something. One of our dons is just like that. Dr. Sappho we call her. She’s really Safford.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you’ll be like that.”

  “Have you ever felt anything for a man, Jamie?” She has never called him Jamie before.

  “I haven’t. But there’s a bloke in college does. Fancies me, as a matter of fact. Asked me if I was interested.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him I wasn’t. But if I ever changed my mind, I’d certainly let him know.” She laughs. He has always been able to do that, make her laugh. “And hey, what about the Russians? Egorkin, and what’s her name?”

  “Nadia Pankova.”

  “Sam got quite peculiar about it. Official Secrets Act and all that. But it’ll be all over the papers tomorrow, won’t it?”

  They speculate a bit, their ideas getting more and more absurd. They should sell their story to the highest bidder. They should write a novel. They should…More beer. People at a nearby table ask if they are American. “Everyone asks if we’re American,” James tells them. “But unlike the Americans, we speak proper English.”

  There’s laughter.

  Ellie points at James. “He doesn’t. He’s from oop North and speaks a strange dialect.”

  More laughter. Gemütlichkeit, that’s what it is. Jolly laughter and contentment. After a while the English pair bid their German interlocutors good night and make their way upstairs. The floors creak beneath their feet, the door creaks as they shut it, the bed creaks as they lie on it. “Do you want to?” James asks.

  Ellie hesitates,
and then says, “Yes, OK.” So they do it. It’s brief and not very skillful, but at least it’s companionship of a kind, and no tears.

  * * *

  Early next morning there’s a feeling of renewal, that they still have a journey to make, although where they might go remains undecided. Tar has been dispensed with. Do they continue south as originally planned? Or?

  Arguing about where and what, they sling their rucksacks and head towards the main road. There’s little traffic but they expect that now. This border area is a wasteland. Empty fields and woods. Fences and military patrols. But after a short distance they do pick up a lift, a local farmer who speaks unintelligible German at them and laughs at what they say back to him. He and his battered NSU take them to a junction near his destination, where the road branches left and right.

  Left is to Regensburg and München, right is to Nürnberg. They stand by the roadside and face the choice. Ellie takes a coin from her pocket and hands it to James. “Heads left, tails right,” she says.

  He flips his thumb. The coin sings as it climbs, spinning over and over, glittering in the morning sunlight. They watch it rise and fall.